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kalikshama -> RE: Stand Your Ground II (6/2/2012 12:26:49 PM)
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I believe this shooting was justified - despite and after a warning shot into the grass, the 35 year old intruder came into the shooter's house. Sounds like he'd sustained a brain injury earlier in the night, but like the 77 year old shooter said, "We didn't have time to psychoanalyze him."
http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/29/us/stand-your-ground/index.html
Shortly after 2 a.m. on November 3, 2004, Workman shot and killed 35-year-old Rodney Cox, a FEMA worker from North Carolina who had come to his house near Pensacola, Florida, and asked for a drink of water.
Workman and his wife, Kathryn, were staying in an RV in the driveway of their home. Hurricane Ivan had made landfall seven weeks earlier, collapsing their front porch and peeling back the roof. The damaged house was unlivable.
It was a scary time on Florida's Perdido Key. People were camped out everywhere, and nerves were frayed. It felt like they were living in a war zone.
Just a week or two before, police subdued a man with a machete at the house next door. And a few days earlier, while they were away, someone in a camper parked in front of their house, used their hose and left the water running.
On a recent weekday, Kathryn Workman, now 62, stood with her husband in front of their tidy brick house with the sweeping view of Big Lagoon and the sugar sand dunes along the Gulf of Mexico. She stepped around her driveway, re-enacting events still vivid in her mind.
It was warm and windy that night and she couldn't sleep. As she reached to adjust a window, she spotted a stranger headed toward the front door of the house. She woke her husband, who grabbed his .38, and stepped outside.
The stranger mumbled and asked for a drink of water. Workman ordered him to "Get on out of here," and fired the warning shot into the grass. Instead, the man bolted toward the trailer where Kathryn was backed up against the kitchen sink, a phone in one hand and her own .38-caliber handgun in the other.
She screamed, telling the 911 dispatcher: "He's in the trailer. He's in the trailer with us. ... Please, oh please God ... He is in here."
There were sounds of a struggle. Seconds later, Kathryn Workman told the dispatcher her husband had shot the intruder.
"He dropped down after a point, and then he got back up," she told CNN, adding that she and her husband tried to edge him toward the RV door. "He died, well, I don't know if he was dead then, but he collapsed right in front of our TV."
When the police came, they had to escort the couple over the body. It was blocking the only way out.
How Rodney Cox, the man Workman shot and killed, came to be on the couple's front lawn -- and inside their trailer -- remains a mystery. But his sister, Terri Lavery, says he was not a drunken, drug-addled drifter up to no good. He was the father of two, married to his high school sweetheart, a successful building contractor who "was kind of preppie."
And on that night, he was a man looking for help.
A few hours before he was shot to death, Cox had called 911 himself, saying he was a victim of domestic violence. It was his first night in the Pensacola area, and he was staying in a camper about two miles from the Workman house.
But he kept giving the dispatcher the wrong address, explaining in frustration, "I'm not from around here."
The deputy who found Cox reported that the man appeared to be intoxicated, describing him as "very jumpy" and "unable to stand still." He said Cox had trouble completing his sentences and was difficult to understand. He did not make note of any injuries.
At some point during the evening, Cox had been hit over the head. The blow was hard enough to fracture his skull, an autopsy showed; his sister believes this may explain his erratic behavior.
Workman knew none of that at 2 a.m., of course. It was dark, his wife was screaming, a stranger was holding him in a bear hug, and there was no time to think it all through.
"We didn't have time to psychoanalyze him," Workman explained.
He added that he made his decision in a heartbeat and feels he was justified. After reviewing the case for nearly four months, a prosecutor agreed and decided not to file charges against Workman.
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