Do you think he should be charged?

Teen Shot 3 Times During Toilet Paper Prank
Monday, October 13, 2008

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SOLON TOWNSHIP, Mich. — A toilet paper prank has led to the shooting of a 14-year-old by a southwestern Michigan man who believed strangers were trying to break into his home.

The Grand Rapids Press and WZZM-TV report the victim and four other teens were pulling the prank about 1 a.m. Sunday at a home in Solon Township, about 20 miles northeast of Grand Rapids.

Kent County sheriff's Lt. Jerry Miedema said the teens were intent on draping the house in toilet paper, while the homeowner's "intent was to come out shooting."

Police say three shots were fired from a 12-gauge shotgun, striking the 14-year-old in the chest, stomach and leg. He is recovering at a local hospital.

The homeowner was not arrested, but a prosecutor is looking into possible charges.

If you think it's a good idea to run out of your home shooting when you hear a sound at 1am, you are too scared to own a gun and should just stay inside until they break in. Then you can shoot them.

"It truly is the one commonality that every designation of humans you can think of has, there's at least one asshole."
--Me

Dunno. I am a tad fanatic about property rights and I don't want anyone mucking about on my property. I think there's missing information here...perhaps there were noises or activity that made the homeowner believe the intruders were burglars. When you trespass, you take yer chances.

They were trespassing and were right up ON his house at 1am, so I think it's believeable that he thought they may have been burglars or worse. Therefore, I think that he was justified in using deadly force to protect his property and/or himself and his family. However, I have seen this type of thing play out AGAINST a homeowner before, up close and personal. When I was about 13 one of our neighbors shot and killed a teen who was attemtping to break into his back door in the middle of the night. It turned out that he was a classmate of his daughter and he had overheard her say that they were going on a famblee camping trip that weekend, but her dad hadn't felt well so he had stayed at home. The dad had ALSO drank a good deal of scotch that night which was held against him at trial. He had called the police and said there was an intruder, he claimed to have yelled at the intruder and warned him he had a gun and that the police had been called, and then he said the intruder kept trying to open the door through the glass door pane he had broken. So, he went outside and shot the kyd , right there on his back patio.

The man was about 40, owned the local Tru-Value hardware store, no priors, no arrests, clean as a whistle. However, the DA pressed charges, with the dead boy's famblee and the media all up his ass, and the man ended up getting 8 1/3-25 years for voluntary manslaughter because he wouldn't take a plea bargain and honestly thought he would be found NOT guilty. If he had taken the plea bargain then he would have not served more than a few months, if any, in jail. He ended up in a state prison for nearly nine years and his whole life, as well as his famblee's, was ruined. No one seemed to give a damn that the kid EASILY looked like a grown man at night, was hopped up on some sort of upper AND drunk, and no stranger to juvie hall. Of course the kyd's prior juvie convictions and arrests were inadmissable.

I think that if an intruder is on your property when they clearly should not be, then deadly force should NOT be against the law, EVEN IF the would be intruder is a "kyd". I am going to research the laws in the state where I recently moved and see how specific it is about killing intruders ON your property, rather than "in" it, just in case. That way I'll know whether to drag his lifeless ass inside before calling the police, after he will have NO DOUBT been shot if he tried to enter my residence. I'd rather be alive in jail then dead in hell, or wherever.

What I've learned recently is that the only person who gets to just shoot people and get away with it is Dick Cheney.

Seriously, someone is walking on your land and you feel you get to shoot them? That doesn't seem right in my mind. What's to keep a person from just answering their door with a shotgun blast? "I heard some footy steps on my porch and wasn't expecting no one so I figured they were gonna steal my booboo and fired." Really, with that kind of thinking, theres no reason NOT to.

That said, I think land ownership is kind of bogus to begin with and that toilet paper is a vastly different form of weaponry than a gun.

"It truly is the one commonality that every designation of humans you can think of has, there's at least one asshole."
--Me

It's better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.

He should be charged, but that gives him the right to a trial, where the facts, whatever they are, will come out.

None of us *really* know what happened - that is why we have trials. It is the responsibility of the prosecutors to convince a jury that he has broken a law.

(It is likely that he would not be found guilty - but that's a different question from "Should he be charged?")

Depends. There are a lot of damaged people out there and a lot of violent exes floating around. I think a man's home is his castle and the onus to be careful is on the trespasser.

I can remember when I was a teen, myself and my friends would cause a bit of mischief at times. I'd hate to think that I or one of my friends could have gotten shot for it. In this case, there are two sides to this story and I agree with Acme, all the facts need to come out. As far as being charged, depends what the law is there.

It's very difficult to say. On one hand, I'd like to say those idjit kids should not have been trespassing and since you can never tell who is nuts and who isn't, they were taking that risk by invading the guy's property. On the other hand...I think shooting someone is a somewhat extreme reaction to tresapssing. On the nonexistant third hand, if the kid was a delinquent...would it really be a tragic if he died? And if he doesn't, maybe those bullets he took will be a greater deterrent than any juvie sentence.

I think both parties should be punished...the kid for trespassing (which, as far as I know, IS still a crime), and the guy for shooting someone over something some verbal abuse and a visit from the police could have solved (I don't think what he did could be considered self-defense).

I think it's totally wrong this guy should shoot someone for outdoors trespass -- if he managed to hit one of them, then he was close and compis mentis enough to see what they were just TP-ing, not breaking in as he claimed they were.

But I'm with him on his frustration. It's not a 'prank'. Pranks are supposed to be funny. Putting an upside-down banana skin on the sidewalk used to be considered a prank until people got the right to sue over broken hips sustained in the fall meant as a 'funny joke'. If police would take it seriously enough, TP-ing would result in the kids being rounded up next day, brought over to the house, and made to lose the entire afternoon cleaning everything up -- every last bit of it -- followed by raking up the leaves, cutting the guy's lawn and trimming his hedges for good measure as the owner and HIS friends looked on from their porch, drinking coffee and mocking them --telling them to 'hurry up' and 'oh you missed a bit over there on that end branch'. See how they like the taste of their own humiliating medicine. Bet they wouldn't do it again and THAT would be a victory for civilisation.

- - - - - - - -
"The death of creativity is a pram in the hallway"
- Cyril Connolly

Feh Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If you think it's a good idea to run out of your
> home shooting when you hear a sound at 1am, you
> are too scared to own a gun and should just stay
> inside until they break in. Then you can shoot
> them.

that's how it works in MD- i do think he should be charged because he was reckless.

Well, if nothing else, I hope the little shits learned a valuable lesson.

And I hope the guy doesn't face charges.