Joshua Lott / Reuters
A mourner holds a picture of 19-year-old shooting victim Renisha McBride during her funeral service in Detroit on Nov. 8.
By Elizabeth Chuck, Staff Writer, NBC News
A homeowner will be charged with second-degree murder in the shooting of an unarmed woman on a suburban Detroit porch earlier this month.
Renisha McBride, 19, was killed on Nov. 2 in Dearborn Heights, Mich., when she went to a man's porch seeking help after a car crash, according to police.
Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy announced three charges against the homeowner — 54-year-old Theodore Paul Wafer — on Friday, the most serious of which was murder in the second degree.
Wafer was not yet in custody and will be asked by prosecutors to turn himself in. He is expected to be arraigned at 2 p.m.
"These are the appropriate charges and he did not act in lawful self-defense," Worthy said.
Wayne County, Michigan prosecutors announced homicide charges against a man accused of shooting a woman in the face after she knocked on his door looking for help.
Few details about what happened the early morning of McBride's death were released before Friday's news conference. The Wayne County medical examiner's office ruled her death was a homicide, finding she received a fatal shotgun blast to the face, fired from a distance.
Police say McBride crashed a car in nearby Detroit and knocked on the homeowner's door afterwards, looking for assistance. McBride was "bloodied, disoriented and appeared to be confused" after the crash, according to witnesses, Worthy said. The homeowner told police he thought McBride was breaking in; he also said his shotgun went off by accident.
"There is no evidence of forced entry into the home," Worthy told reporters Friday after announcing the charges, which also included manslaughter and firearms possession during the attempted commission of a felony or commission of a felony. "Our evidence shows she knocked on the locked screen door."
The killing of the unarmed McBride, who was black, has prompted questions from her family and protests from civil rights leaders, who believe racial profiling may have played a role. Police had not identified the owner of the home in Dearborn Heights, a predominantly white suburb of Detroit.
Supporters of her family have demonstrated outside the Dearborn Heights police station, calling for authorities to charge the homeowner in her death.
Worthy would not comment on the racial allegations and did not reveal Wafer's race, but a spokesperson for the prosecutor told The Associated Press Wafer is white.
"The charging decision has nothing to do whatsoever with the race of the parties. Whether it becomes relevant later on, I don't know," Worthy said.
Michigan's self-defense law states that residents have no duty to retreat while in their own homes if they have an honest and reasonable belief of imminent death or great bodily harm.
On Thursday, a toxicology report from the medical examiner's office revealed McBride had a high blood alcohol content and marijuana in her system when she died.
McBride's blood alcohol content was .218 percent, nearly three times the legal driving limit of 0.08 percent in the state of Michigan.
Her crash involved a parked vehicle six blocks away, authorities told The Detroit Free Press.
Gerald Thurswell, the McBride family's attorney, said the homeowner called 911 after he shot McBride, and said that police arrived within minutes.
"If he had called 911 when he heard her outside his house, they would have been there within two minutes and she would be alive today," Thurswell said. "Maybe she would have been arrested for being intoxicated, but she would not be dead."
Thurswell said on MSNBC on Friday he doesn't believe that the results of the toxicology report will affect the case.
"If she was intoxicated, and apparently she was .... that gives nobody justification to blow off her head," he said. "She was outside making noise. We don't shoot drunks who are making noise."
The family was pleased with the charges that were announced, he added.
"Their patience paid off because the prosecutor did a thorough and complete investigation," he said.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This story was originally published on Fri Nov 15, 2013 11:09 AM EST
0 comments:
Post a Comment