15 year old knocks at wrong house. Shot and killed by homeowner

[Liberal_in_LA]

15-year-old boy shot in the abdomen Saturday has died and a 42-year-old homeowner has been arrested in his death.

Jeffery Lovell, 42, 120 Boucher Circle, has been charged with murder. He is being held in the Chicopee Police Department jail without right to bail, Michael Wilk, public information officer for the Chicopee Police Department, said.

Lovell is being accused of shooting the teenager through the door of his house at about 12:56 p.m., Saturday.

Police initially received a call of a breaking and entering into the home in the Fairview section of the city. When they arrived, they found the teenager on the ground suffering from a gunshot wound to his abdomen, Wilk said.

"It was determined that three parties went to the residence believing it to be (the home of) a friend. One party, the victim, was banging on the outside door, when the homeowner shot through the door, striking the male," Wilk said.

Investigators found the victim and a friend were drinking alcohol at a nearby home. The two friends were confused while walking in the neighborhood and believed they had arrived at the home of another friend, said James Leydon, spokesman for Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni, said.

Lovell, the homeowner, tried to communicate with the victim, who was still knocking on the locked door, Leydon said.

"When a pane of glass broke, the suspect fired a single shot, striking the victim," Leydon said.

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/07/chicopee_shooting_leaves_15-ye.html

[chillfactor]

1. another senseless shooting...

and a young boy is dead.....hope Lovell rots in prison.

[KG]

2. another responsible gun owner - till he wasn't.

2A uber alles!

[glennward]

3. Our country is going to hell in a gun barrel. nt

[Ohioblue22]

4. If ever one deserved the gas chamber

[Hoppy]

5. Homeowner, hears banging on door. We don't know what the kids were saying while banging on door.

Remember, they were drinking.

He then calls cops to report an attempted break-in.

Then he hears the glass on his front door break.

Do you think he has a right to be a little scared?

[LisaL]

6. Too bad for him -he doesn't live in TX.

[Zynx]

7. Why is it appropriate to shoot to kill in this circumstance?

I don't think it's even appropriate to shoot to kill if they break in and make off with your TV. Why should you as a private citizen be able to inflict a punishment so much more severe than the law provides?

I hope this murderer goes to jail. That wasn't self-defense.

[uponit7771]

14. +1, the rules of engagement for our troops in war zones are higher than most cities and cops !!!

[Flyboy_451]

25. ask Joe Biden...

“Well, you know, my shotgun will do better for you than your AR-15, because you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door.” -Joe Biden 2013 interview in Field and Stream

Unfortunately, people say and do some really stupid stuff. When people in positions of authority say things like this, it makes the problem even worse. This is a perfect example of someone who many of us respect and even admire saying one of the most moronic things imaginable.

The long and the short of the matter is that people need to think before they speak, and most certainly BEFORE THEY ACT! We have become a nation of people that are ill informed about far too many things. We put more credence in "well, ____ told me that this was ok.", than we do in actually KNOWING something thru research and rational thought.

This guy deserves the murder charge, and it seems likely a conviction is appropriate. At the same time, the people that say things similar to what our VP has said, share the credit.

JW

[CBGLuthier]

8. Right to be scared, sure. Right to fire blindly like an asshole, no fucking way.

[Bettie]

9. So, the standard is that if you are "a little scared"

you get to murder someone?

I guess things have really changed.

Anyone with a gun gets to commit murder with impunity because he might have been "a little scared".

[Person 2713]

13. This appears to be the case with the general public . With law enforcement even if they are not

scared, but not getting the respect they expect or authority questioned this seems to apply.
Also as with Trayvon, you can seek out the confrontation and be in the right to kill. It doesn't have to include a stance at your home, or any minor offense
Sad that although there are some outraged overwhelmingly most will side with the scared , offended and vigilantes

[uponit7771]

15. +1, both Zimmerman and Wilson placed themselves CLOSER to the thing they pointed out was..

... the threat and then used that as an excuse to murder.

[Bettie]

23. Exactly right

And I wonder how much of it is how they are trained these days. There appears to be zero intent toward deescalation, just a shoot to kill mentality...empty your gun into anyone you please, don't worry, you won't face more than a paid vacation.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

42. When drunk kids beat on your door so hard that the glass shatters ...

... then it starts to look like more than "a little scared". It starts to look like home invasion. It may even look like provocation.

If evidence shows that the glass was broken from the outside, by the kid, then I think a decent lawyer will get the case thrown out.

[ehrnst]

10. There are things that I am rightfully afraid of, too

Someone getting loud and abusive at my son and his friends at a swimming pool.

Someone driving aggressively and nearly causing an accident.

An angry anti-choice hassler in front of the women's clinic where I escort.

Do I have a right to shoot any of them?

No. There has to be a limit on what is considered "reasonable" fear that justifies the use of deadly force, or everyone's "fear" becomes reasonable. Calling the 911 was the response needed.

[Hoppy]

11. Start off with, I don't own a gun., rifle, bb gun or even a potato shooting gun.

In our state, we have home break-ins. Two years ago, a woman in the next town was severely beaten in front of her kids and thrown down the basement stairs. The puke was convicted last month and will probably never get out of prison, after sentencing.

So yes. There are reasons to be afraid when someone is banging on your door and then breaking the storm door glass.

[kcr]

16. Being afraid isn't a reason to kill someone, though.

Because in this instance it turned out there wasn't actually a reason to be afraid. If he hadn't have panicked, no one would be dead. A drunk teenager barged into my home once, too and scared the shit out of me. She isn't dead. See how easy that was?

[Hoppy]

17. It may not be a justifiable reason, but it is a reason.

We killed hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq because we were made afraid.....a smoking cloud and a mushroom gun...

50/50 he gets off

[kcr]

19. Oh, it's a reason. I'm not arguing that.

It's a reason why guns are a bad idea for self defense.

[LanternWaste]

27. A reason... or merely an excuse.

A reason... or merely an excuse.

[Hoppy]

45. If he hadn't called the cops first, it would have been an excuse.

[Igel]

22. Most people aren't fortunate enough to know how things will turn out in advance.

You see something dangerous--some guys breaking your door and shouting--you have to wonder what's going on. You don't know who they are and you don't have all the hindsight information we suffer from. (Yes, "suffer," because it's severely injuring any sense of perspective we might have. We know all this. Why didn't the guy with the gun?)

A couple of teenagers barged into the house of a woman a few blocks away from where I live. Surprised by seeing the woman in the house, when she yelled at them they shot her. They stole her tv and left. Weren't ever caught, and alarm services did a great business around here for a while.

We evaluate risk badly.

We tend to think we and ours are more important than others.

[kcr]

24. Not a reason the rest of us need to be fodder.

People knock on doors. People sneak back in after they've been out all night and they don't want to get in trouble with their parents. They cut across yards. They play the latest GPS phone app. They yell at people who startle them. That's the reason guns are horrible for self defense. They make innocent people fodder.

[hollysmom]

29. Iheard banging on my door at 3 am. granted they did not bbreak the window inthe door - it is so

far up it is useless as a window unless i am on the stairs. It is a strong oak door on an old house so not likely to break. it was 3 drunks, I know because they were toaking, I don't know where they thought they were, they were just thrown out of a high end restaurant on the end of the block (something I used successfully when they wanted to switch from a byob to have liquor license and others around tried to stop it), anyway here we are in a triple A residential neighborhood at 3 am. They didn't know me, they wanted to use my bathroom, I did not even open the door, I just called the police and let them know, they peed on my azaleas and got into a car (this is the real scary part). they were gone before the police arrived. Normally they are there in 1 minute since the police department is a block away, but the few police cars on duty were not near me. I sent them to hunt the drunks, I don't know if they caught them. Are front doors not built strongly anymore? At no time was I afraid they were going to break in, Perhaps it was the off key singing that made me feel safe.But i did get angry when they pissed on my plants.

[Initech]

18. The gun was fired. That makes all of that irrelevant.

Firing the gun and murdering the teenager trumps all the other events that led up to that point. There is no justification for murder one.

[etherealtruth]

20. Sounds an awful lot like this:

Detroit-area man gets 17 to 32 years for shooting visitor on porch
http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-porch-killer-sentenced-20140903-story.html


No one may ever know why 19-year-old Renisha McBride knocked on the door of Theodore Wafer’s house in a Detroit suburb before dawn in November. But there is no dispute that Wafer, 55, afraid and groggy, shot McBride through his screen door, killing her, and then called 911.

[Festivito]

35. Since then, a couple of would-be theives have been shot dead entering homes.

In Detroit, not Dearborn Heights as in the McBride shooting. The shooters, homeowners, were questioned and not charged. They waited for perpetrators to enter the house, not shooting through a door.

Since then, break-ins have decreased in my Detroit neighborhood to involving only acquaintances and family raiding people known to them.

[etherealtruth]

38. Well Wafer was tried and convicted for Renishas McBrides murder

Knocking on the wrong door drunk does not give one just cause to kill ... and yes Ms. McBride was intoxicated (as was the 15 year old in the OP)

[Festivito]

39. Yup, he was. Shot right through the door. eom

[etherealtruth]

40. Exactly

[brush]

28. Wonder if he actually heard the door glass break?

Or told that to the cops to make it seem the boys were trying to break in?

Guess we'll find out from further investigation. Seems the door glass would have been shattered by a shot gun blast coming through it.

[lostnfound]

31. I agree. Glass more likely broke WHEN the shot was fired

But regardless, these people firing blindly into a door without seeing what they are hitting end up shooting kids LIKE THIS 15 YEAR OLD or or shooting their own children, like this DEPUTY who was scared (http://www.your4state.com/news/news/father-shoots-teen-daughter-mistaken-for-intruder) or this man http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/12/us/father-shoots-son/
Or these three
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/12/24/3102541/father-shoots-kills-14-year-daughter-saying-mistook-burglar/
Or this one seven months ago in Florida
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3378935/Florida-woman-accidentally-shoots-kills-daughter-thinking-s-intruder.html

When I get scared, I hide, or I call someone, or I flew.
To a man with a hammer, all the world looks like a nail.

[TexasMommaWithAHat]

33. Depends which side of the door the glass is

Some would fall on both sides, but this can be determined from the glass splatter.

[hamsterjill]

30. I think when all is said and done, the homeowner will not be charged.

It is indeed a sad situation that a young man lost his life.

Given the facts as stated here, yes, I think the homeowner had a right to be a little scared.

[TheCowsCameHome]

12. Send it over to the Gungeon for expert analysis.

They'll find some way to justify it.

[Iggo]

32. Afraid = Kill OK

Gunfondler logic.

[DashOneBravo]

21. That's terrible

I'm glad they are charging that guy. It's murder.

They also need to start charging every time someone is shot through negligence.

[yeoman6987]

26. The jury will hear the kid was drunk and acquit

Lord I hope I am wrong but just getting arrested doesn't mean he will be found guilty. Juries can be persuaded.

[marybourg]

34. A 42 year old homeowner may very well

have a wife and young children in the house. I doubt that any man would be convicted for protecting his family from what reasonably sounded to him like an attempt to break into his house where his young family was present.

If there is ever a legitimate place for a citizen to use deadly force it's in protection of one's own family in one's own home. The only question is: would a reasonable person in the same position have acted that way? And here I think, if the facts are what has been reported until now, the answer would be: yes.

[loveandlight]

36. reasonable??

This is what is wrong with this country right now. White people are so afraid. Seeing a black person standing around makes them afraid, no less being at their front door. The very fact of their fear then becomes a "reasonable" reason to shoot someone through a closed door instead of calling 911 or doing something actually reasonable. I am so sad to see that someone posting on a progressive board like this thinks it is reasonable. The times we live in are getting less and less reasonable.

[hughee99]

37. The victim was black?

I must have missed that in the article. I didn't see where it identified the race of the victim at all.

[Dreamer Tatum]

41. Shooting through a door is murder in my book. nt

[tblue37]

43. Some years ago (around 1990 or so) I was up reading at about

3:00 a.m., when suddenly I heard someone pounding very aggressively on my door. When I looked through the peephole, I saw what appeared to be a teenaged boy in a hoodie. Since I am a woman and I was living alone, I did not even consider opening the door to a stranger at that hour. Instead, I called the police and watched through the peephole to keep an eye on the person until they got there a few minutes later.

It turned out that the person was a teenaged girl, just wandering around in the ugly hours of the morning. Who knows why she thought it appropriate to pound on a stranger's door at 3:00 in the morning. When the cops came, I asked her why she did that--and whether something was wrong and she needed help--but no, she had seen that my light on and just figured she could come in and hang out.

Remember, I did not know her at all.

I wondered afterward whether maybe she was a runaway or maybe drunk or high and therefore not thinking clearly. I imagine that the police sorted it out.

But my point is that I was a woman living alone, so I would probably have had more reason to be afraid than most of these guys who blast people through their doors. Also, because my apartment was small, if someone had broken in I would have had no place to barricade myself to hide after calling the cops.

But besides the fact that I didn't have a gun, I would never have considered it appropriate to shoot through a closed door at someone.

[whistler162]

44. Another alcohol related death.

"Investigators found the victim and a friend were drinking alcohol at a nearby home. "