Fatal shooting of University of South Carolina student who tried to enter wrong home 'justifiable,' police say

No, they have physical evidence, audio evidence which probably means camera or video doorbell and the kid died on the front porch of someone else's house. Seems like the story told itself. The simple explanation is he tried breaking into the wrong house thinking it was his own.

Not saying he deserved to die over his mistake, it's tragic and sad that the situation occurred.

Editing to add this from the article:

"evidence gathered at the scene, review of surveillance video that captures moments before the shooting, audio evidence, and witness statements."

What would the other side of the story be? That he was breaking into his own house, but that the gun was fired from someone that had already broken into his own house and was wrongfully residing there? The facts are pretty basic here.

20 years old is an grown man, not a kid.

Hard to imagine I'd not do the same thing if that happened to my house with my family home.

Don't you think it might've been different if it was your own home (instead of a rented dorm/apartment), and instead of roommates you had a wife and possibly other family members in the home?

He thought he was locked out of his home I'm sure.

Not in my state. No deadly threat, no clear intent to commit a felony. Breaking in is not enough for precisely this reason: the person entering may have a mistaken claim of right.

Did you just tell yourself to STFU?

If the public wasn't allowed to have guns and this guy did turn out to be a home invader, what would you say then?

Look at that 100%justified use. If only it legal to defend yourself where I live like this. That would be great.

I actually don't hate castle doctrine tbh, which is commonly confused with the more controversial "stand your ground." I frankly do not see "a duty to retreat" from one's own occupied dwelling in the event of an intruder, in my opinion that duty dissipates the second forcible entry has been made to my home.

The common thing I hear is "they usually just want your TV," but A) The best way to steal a TV is to push a cart, trust me, especially if you still have a 24hr walmart, and B) if you have to rob people of their TV who are also probably living paycheck to paycheck, at least have the common decency to not do so while they're home and scare the shit out of them. For all they know you could be a rapist or a murderer even if just out of opportunity or "no witnesses," even by accident with poor gun safety from robbers. Tbh it's hard for me to agree that some poor family should have to flee their own home or hide in a closet if someone else decides to enter it unlawfully.

An unknown person breaking the glass and potentially armed could be a threat.

That's a valid statement.

It also demonstrates a wider problem: gun proliferation is so incredibly high that the default assumption is always going to be "that person might have a gun," and this will always prompt a much lowered threshold to use one's own gun in return.

Idk man, I'm liberal as hell and even I have problems with that line of logic. Man's smashing up their house, putting myself in the invadees shoes I'd be worried about warning the home invader(s) and making them use their weapons.

I'm not saying I think everything is fine and dandy in this situation, mfs are using guns way to much in America. But since the occupants had a gun for self defense AND their home was being broken into, I find it hard to blame them for defending themselves.

Could have been avoided? Maybe. But at some point the onus is on the person breaking into your house to...idk, not do that? Like there's a spectrum between what you can do, what you should do and what you have to do and asking some questions first is certainly something you can do. Maybe even something you should do, but protecting your family from someone who is breaking into your house is something you have to do. This isn't Ralph Yarl who got popped twice for standing on the porch, or those girls who were still in the car and backing out of someone's driveway when they got clipped. Dude tried to break into the house by kicking the door in, that didn't work, so he tried a different way of breaking into the house which would have worked had he been left to it.

I'm usually pretty firmly against preemptive violence as self defense but this seems rather cut and dry to me. I would have done the exact same thing the homeowner did here, and I think that it's doubly good that the homeowner wasn't charged.

It's not about protection of property to me. I don't care about that. I care about people having the right to use all reasonable options for defending themselves against violent attackers. And to your point, might this person's death have been avoided if the occupants of the home had fled or hid somewhere? Certainly. But should they be legally required to do so? No, not in my opinion. Reason being, I don't think the impetus should be on victims to take their attackers' well-being into account when it's the attackers that are creating the problem in the first place. Telling a person who is scared for their life that they need to fight the impulse coming from their amygdala to fight back against a violent attacker is totally unreasonable. If a person is coming at me with their fists and I have a gun, I don't think I should have to refrain from firing my weapon and take the hits my attacker is throwing, just to make sure he doesn't die. What if I die? What if I lose an eye or get my face scarred up? What if he takes my gun and shoots me? No. No, fuck that, if someone is attacking me, they've given me permission to defend myself in whatever way seems reasonable to me, and I'm not risking my own life or even just serious injury because someone else has anger management problems. They're the problem; they're the threat to society; if they die, yeah that sucks, but it's their fucking fault, not mine for defending myself against their violent behavior.

I'm so sick of people having all this empathy for violent criminals, and way too little for their victims. You want to tell other people to react in a calm, collected, pacifist manner when they're being attacked, to risk their own lives and wellbeing for the sake of their attacker's? Tell you what, you get yourself attacked somehow when you're not expecting it and demonstrate how cool, calm, and pacifist you are under fire; you show the rest of us how easy that is. You do that, and maybe I'll consider what you have to say, but until then, you're just a hand-wringing, pearl-clutching bystander who has their priorities messed up and doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about.

Those other options also put you at a greater potential for being harmed yourself. Your goal should always be to not get harmed

You could fight them Kevin style...would give you a better chance of not killing somebody.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm53BnikXTI

Donofrio broke a glass window on the front door "and reached inside to manipulate the doorknob,"

How much more "immediate" do you need? A complete stranger is trying to break into your home to do god knows what is the epitome of a clear and immediate danger to me.

What would you have done? Opened the door and welcomed them in?

The U.S. spends a tremendous amount of its energy on paranoia, checks and balances, and being remarkably resistant to large-scale changes of the status quo, particularly with respect to rights attendant to private property.

In the current period of bullet trains, wind farms, and unisex bathrooms, it is incredibly inconvenient, even dangerous in its own right. It looks like an operating system bug, but only because it is holding up a feature that the real owners of America don't like advertised.

There is a reason the dollar is still the global reserve currency- because the entire system was set up to make private property despot-and-revolution-resistant, and the smart money knows it.

The world is heading into a major demographic shift that is going to hit everybody's social model like a brick through a plate glass window- too many pensioners and not enough taxpayers, and no one has built the roomba that cooks and cleans for grandma yet. We will get to watch a preview in China and Russia quite soon. The pitchforks are going to come out again, and politicians will blow with the wind.

But if you own land/stuff in America, you will still own land/stuff in America.

I'm not saying it is right, or just. It is simply some useful perspective on what such an awkward, irritating, distributed, recursive system might have been designed for, because it certainly wasn't designed for speed.

The term "storm canvas" comes to mind, and with it a reminder to keep an eye to windward.

You engage them in conversion, explain to them simply they are at the wrong house, and keep pushing that point

Source: I had this situation happen to me at uni, explained to the side he had the wrong house, showed him the house number, and he calmly left.

Phone the police, and then shout back asking what he wanted.

1. Talk to the person
2. Call the police and tell the person the police is coming
3. Block the person from coming in
4. If he comes in anyway use tools like baseball bat, hammer or kitchen knife to defend yourself

You can bang on a reinforced steel door all you want until the police comes.

We hate having these garbage laws to protect rooty tooty point and shooty more than our actual citizens

Perfect.

Hush, your ruining the narrative.

Sounds like a justified shooting. If it were legal where iived I'd shoot at that point.

None of the articles I've seen have said whether the residents said anything before shooting. If they didn't, they absolutely should have.

Yeah, because drunk, unarmed people are such a threat, that you have to just shoot him.

As if in every other country we don't have drunks...

Especially drunk people are mostly no threat. Even my grandma always said "oh, a drunk man has no strength"

It kinda sounds hyped up and hysterical from the outside, to be honest

Edit: ah, missed that you aren't from the US. but still, you would shoot a drunk guy, just because you feel threatened?
There are so many possibilities to defend yourself, I can't see a gun to be necessary - or even justified

You clearly are an idiot. I mean like you have zero understanding of anything other than cyberpunk paid expansions. You are a hate filled individual and you have only been here for 3 weeks? My lord are you alone? scared about who and what you are? A big sad fat turd?

Phone the police and tell him to fuck off? Maybe hit their arm with a bat or something. If I was alone I could even just leave. Not immediately execute them.

Well where I live there aren't nearly as many guns so the person breaking in would be less likely to have a deadly weapon and it would be a bit less risky to just call the police and hide, or comply with the (assumed) robber, or I'd feel like I'd have a better chance with using a blunt weapon like a bat to protect myself and drive them off, which would be less likely to kill someone. But where I live there are also a lot less robberies in general.

Doesn't guarantee nobody would have died if the same thing happened in a place with less gun violence, but it might have reduced the chances. Even if people get into the same kinds of confrontations, if there aren't guns involved the chances of everyone surviving a violent encounter goes up by a significant percentage. Less guns in a country over-all means less chances for a conflict to have a gun involved.

I dont have any guns so probly hiding and calling cops. But also I dont live in any other developed country, Im not blaming the homeowner for fearing for his life in the country with more guns than people. If we were somewhere else, not only would the homeowner not have a gun, anyone trying to break in would be much less likely to have one.

probably depends on if guns are involved or not.

I'd leave.

Hard to shoot someone who's made an honest mistake when you don't have a gun...

This is the US mentality. Yeah, kid was very dumb, kid was in the wrong. Kid should probably be arrested and spend some time in jail to learn his lesson. Nope, death penalty.

They are. The amount of people who confidently say they'd shoot before attempting to communicate has me terrified; like they want a reason to escalate the situation.

They don’t realise they wouldn’t have to fear other people so much if there were no guns available in the first place. I’m sure I’ll get a lot of replies that gangsters don’t obey rules and what not but isn’t that the same in every other country without guns?

Home invasions happen in countries that have strict gun laws. I've lived in a bad apartment complex (one apartment was a trap house, a neighbor was stabbed on his way home from work, several vehicles were stolen and mine was vandalized), and a neighbor tried to get into my apartment late one night. I didn't own a gun at the time, but I absolutely would have stabbed him with a kitchen knife if he had broken a window and stuck his hand inside. Instead, I asked him if he was okay and explained that he was at the wrong apartment.

In this case, the person was literally breaking into the house, broken window, reaching for the doorknob. The homeowner had every reason to think their home was being invaded. And given how violent crime can get in the states, unfortunately shooting first in such a situation does make logical sense.

The situation sucks, but this case might be more on the system than the shooter.

You don't need a gun to kill someone, it's creepy enougth to assume the intruder has 'just' a big knife

That type of thing happens in the US as well. It doesn't ALWAYS end with a gun. I'd say most of the time it doesn't.

This person broke a window though and was actively forcing themselves into the home. That's a pretty big difference from "trying a key and ringing the doorbell."

It's always going to be a judgement call, for a different intruder theirs would've been the right call. It's not even about guns, there are knives, drugs, etc. They're all relevant and the kinds of people that are breaking windows can be dangerous.

I forget all the details but a former neighbors son had an extremely traumatic experience when he was out with a trainee as a paramedic and a guy hopped up on some concoction of drugs incapacitated him (I think by throwing him against the wall) and then the dude spun around and beat the trainee's skull in with some object.

Just because you haven't heard of it... doesn't mean it doesn't happen in your country, but I hope you're right. Idealistically you're definitely right, this sort of thing never should happen, but sometimes there's no good answer; you just do the best you can with the information and situation you're in.

Keep trying, it's good to be reminded that there are people like yourself who don't think this should be normal

Arson (50% jk)

TIL facts are now considered propaganda

So, defending yourself is only valid once you're actually in the process of being killed? A bit too late at that point. Someone physically breaking into your home is a valid reason to use force in response.

Donofrio repeatedly knocked, banged and kicked on the front door "while manipulating the door handle" while trying to enter the home.

Donofrio broke a glass window on the front door "and reached inside to manipulate the doorknob"

He broke the glass and tried to open the door from the inside. If I were inside that house, I'd certainly feel threatened.

That is completely incorrect and shows you didn't read the article. The guy physically was breaking the door open.

But he literally broke a window and reached around to open the door from the inside. After trying to kick the door in.

It's a tragedy, but the homeowner was 100% justified.

The problem is you can't judge people's actions on what we know after the fact, you have to look at what the person knew in the moment, and for the residents, it sure seemed like someone was breaking into their house, and it's not reasonable to expect to have a dialogue with a burglar.

No one was actually breaking into their home though.

He very LITERALLY broke into his home. Are you delusional?

Makes a mistake? That's one hell of a mistake, he was litterally breaking and entering. Just because he was drunk is he no longer responsible for his actions? He chose to go get shitfaced and then he went and tried to break into a home when the residents were home in a castle doctrine state. The only more reliable method of getting shot that I can think of is walking around the woods in a deer costume durring hunting season.

Also how about we stop victim blaming the home owner here. Yes it would have been better if the guy had lived. There's no question there. But the residents did exactly what they should have with the information they had at their disposal. They called the cops first but, when the dude broke the window and it became aparent that the police would not get there in time, they did what they needed to do to protect themselves while minimizing the chance of them being harmed. Letting a clearly agitated and potentially armed assailant actually enter their home just on the off chance that assailant was actually friendly would have been beyond stupid. The homeowner not mag dumping on the guy actually shows far more restraint than we typically even see from our police.

Spoken like someone who's never feared for their life or more importantly, feared for their partner's life.

I don't, but I also don't want people to think they can just shoot me with no repercussions.

Same, this sounds like what the homeowner/killer is going to be telling himself the next day to rationalize it (if he even thinks about it that deeply).

America is a big place. Maybe your area is better. Or maybe you aren't aware of it in your area. But the number of neighbors in my area who have had mentally ill people (probably homeless) come to thier door sayimg they live there or what not is pretty high. And I am out in the suburbs. Combine that with the yearly stories of a mentally ill person with a history of random violence arrests who kills someone and it's no suprise people fear. A large part of the population lives in areas like this or in cities. But not everyone for sure.

true, but that ship has sailed.

Glad breaking and entering is now considered worth a death sentence.

By all accounts he thought he was entering his own home, thought he was breaking his own windows, etc. Seems to me like a little more dialog and this kid's still alive and a broken window is the worst part of the event. With castle doctrine laws the way they are mistakes and misunderstandings are much more likely to become fatal.