ROBERT ARP
Raylan Givens puts a bullet in Tommy Bucks on a rooftop patio in Miami, and lots of people who didn’t see the exchange question whether Raylan really was justified in shooting the cartel thug.
We the viewers know that Raylan probably was justified in that case because we see that Bucks did in fact “pull first” causing Raylan to quick-draw-McGraw him into the next life. Killing in self-defense when your life truly is threatened seems justified from almost any worldview—except, perhaps, from the pacifist’s perspective. (Believe it or not, the great Catholic philosopher and theologian, St. Augustine, was opposed to killing in self-defense because he thought it was self-centered and sinful, remarking that “Private self-defense can only proceed from some degree of inordinate self-love.”)
However, there are other times that Raylan shoots people dead, and we have to wonder if he could have arrested them or even put a bullet in a non-vital organ and then arrested them. This “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality likens Raylan to the justice-dispensing vigilante marshals of America’s Wild West of the late nineteenth century like Wyatt Earp (1848–1929). Those marshals were judge, jury, and executioner all wrapped up in one. Below are controversial—and, at times, shocking—cases of people who felt they were justified in doing what they did.
You be the judge. You could even be the jury. . . . But please don’t be the executioner!
Earp Brothers Justified
This was the headline for a story written by John Clum in the Tombstone Daily Epitaph on Thursday, October 27th, 1881, one day after the most famous gunfight in the history of the American Wild (Old) West, the Shootout at the OK Corral.
This was a thirty-second gunfight that took place near the rear entrance to the Old Kindersley horse corral at about 3:00 P.M. on Wednesday, October 26th, in Tombstone, Arizona, between the town’s marshal, Virgil Earp—with the assistance of his brothers Morgan and Wyatt, and John Henry “Doc” Holliday—and Billy Claiborne, Ike and Billy Clanton, and Tom and Frank McLaury. Earp and his group had heard that Claiborne and his other outlaw cowboy buddies were secretly packing their Colt .45s in violation of the town ordinance that guns had to be kept in the marshal’s office while visiting Tombstone. Plus, the cowboys had been claiming for several days that they were “gonna fill them Earp brothers full ’a lead.”
So, the Earps and Holliday confronted the cowboys and . . . Bang! Bang! Bang! Billy Clanton and both McLaurys were killed, while Claiborne and Ike Clanton turned yella and hightailed outta there. Virgil was shot through the calf and Morgan was shot in the back, but both lived—Wyatt and the Doc came through the fight unharmed.
Clum wrote in the Tombstone Daily Epitaph that the “feeling among the best class of our citizens is that the Marshal was entirely justified in his efforts to disarm these men, and that being fired upon they had to defend themselves, which they did most bravely,” and that’s the story that made its way around the States. In popular culture, the Earps have always been the good guys, with Wyatt stealing the spotlight; consider the numerous movies made throughout the years, such as Frontier Marshal (1934), Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), Tombstone (1993), and Wyatt Earp (1994) where the Earps are portrayed as squeaky-clean, law-abiding, God-fearing, family-oriented folk. But scholars in the past few years who researched the events surrounding the OK Corral—including the dozens of first-hand accounts of townsfolk—probably would sympathize with the epitaph under portraits of the McLaury brothers found on a plaque located at the historic site that reads: “One owes respect to the living; but to the dead, one owes nothing but the truth.”
And the truth seems to be that not only has way too much been made of Wyatt Earp’s role in Tombstone and at the OK Corral, but also that the only thing really distinguishing the Earps and Doc Holliday from the outlaw cowboys they often confronted was the fact that they wore tin stars on the lapels of their jackets. Take Wyatt, for example: throughout his life he was a killer, arguably a murderer, horse thief, “misappropriator” of funds, pistol-whipper, cold cocker, convict, escaped convict, brothel frequenter, brothel owner, pimp, adulterer, husband of a common-law wife who was convicted of prostitution, saloon keeper, gambler, extorter, bouncer, teamster, miner, and boxing referee, in addition to being a deputized marshal, city policeman, and county sheriff.
On November 30th, 1881 Justice Wells Spicer ruled that the killings at the OK Corral were “a necessary act, done in the discharge of an official duty” and that the Earps and Holliday
saw at once the dire necessity of giving the first shot to save themselves from certain death. They acted; their shots were effective, and this alone saved all the Earp party from being slain.
There’s a continuation to the OK Corral saga, however, that rivals the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud (1863–1891). When Virgil Earp was partially crippled in a December 1881 assassination attempt, Wyatt took his place as deputy US marshal. After younger brother Morgan’s murder in March of 1882 at the hands of relatives and sympathizers of the so-called “bad guys” at the OK Corral, Wyatt went on the notorious “vendetta ride” that resulted in the killings of cowboys Frank Stilwell, Florentino “Indian Charlie” Cruz, “Curly Bill” Brocious, and, some believe, Johnny Ringo. Wyatt was allowed to ride off into the sunset—amazingly(!)—even further west to Los Angeles, where he lived a prosperous and famous life, dying of prostate cancer on January 13th, 1929 at the age of eighty.
Justifiably Standing Your Ground
A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be, has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.
The above quotation is the essence of the so-called stand-your-ground law from chapter 776 of the 2011 Florida Statutes (776.013: Home protection; use of deadly force; presumption of fear of death or great bodily harm) that Florida and several other US States have adopted. It’s a type of self-defense law that gives someone the right to use deadly force to defend herself or himself without any requirement to evade or retreat from a dangerous situation. And, given the “reasonable belief” part of the law, someone can use this deadly force based upon the perception of imminent danger—essentially, if I think my life is in danger as a result of your actions, I can kill you and legally get away with it.
As you can imagine, it’s controversial for at least two reasons. First, if Frank and John get into an altercation with one another, Frank could easily kill John in what Frank claims is “self-defense,” but it’s really just that Frank is pissed off and wants John dead; thus, Frank has abused the law or manipulated it to his own advantage. Second, and more significantly, the person who has “the other side of the story” in an altercation—in this case, John—can’t tell his side to the police or lawyers, since “dead men tell no tales!” If just Frank and John were involved in the altercation, and no one else was around to witness it, who can corroborate Frank’s claim that he “reasonably believed” that his life was in danger as a result of John’s actions?
In fact, since 2011 self-defense claims in Florida alone have tripled! Fancy that! Before passage of the law, Miami police chief John F. Timoney called the law unnecessary and dangerous: “Whether it’s trick-or-treaters, kids playing in the yard of someone who doesn’t want them there, or some drunk guy stumbling into the wrong house, you’re encouraging people to possibly use deadly physical force where it shouldn’t be used.” In 2007, the US National District Attorneys Association’s American Prosecutors Research Institute published a report echoing Timoney’s claim, and an Internet blogger has wisely noted:
It is important to remember that the US justice system is not set up to pass judgment on thoughts and motivations. . . . Florida’s stand-your-ground law may inadvertently protect people who overreact to potentially dangerous situations.
The Curious Case of Curtis Reeves
On a sign in the lobby of the Cobb Grove 16 Theater complex located in Wesley Chapel, Florida (30 miles north of Tampa Bay) it says, “No cell phone use, including texting, in the theater auditorium,” and “No weapons allowed.” But texting is exactly what forty-three-year-old Chad Oulson was doing before the 1:20 P.M. showing of Lone Survivor on January 13th 2014. It would be the final text message of his life. That’s because a seventy-one-year-old retired Tampa police officer who was sitting near Oulson, Curtis Reeves, put a bullet from the .380 semi-automatic pistol he was carrying in his pocket straight through Oulson’s heart.
Apparently, Reeves didn’t read the sign in the lobby either. Reeves was charged with second-degree murder in the shooting of Oulson, who was texting his twenty-two-month-old daughter’s babysitter during the previews. Oulson was at the theater with his wife, while Reeves was at the theater with his wife anticipating the arrival of their son, Matthew, who was running late. After Reeves complained to Oulson about his texting, and Oulson replied that he was texting his daughter’s babysitter, an irritated Reeves left briefly to complain to the theater management. He returned alone, and the argument continued.
Witnesses said Oulson got up and threw a bag of popcorn at Reeves. In an instant, Pow! Reeves shot Oulson dead with a bullet to the chest that passed through Oulson’s wife’s finger as she was trying to hold him back from confronting Reeves. Matthew Reeves had just shown up to the darkened theater, actually, seconds before the shooting, heard the shot, went over to Oulson, and tried to save his life by applying pressure to the wound with a t-shirt—all the while not realizing that it was his own father who shot the man. Reeves’s lawyers are playing the stand-your-ground card and have argued that he “was in the best position to perceive that the danger to him and his elderly wife was imminent and that deadly force was absolutely necessary to prevent death, great bodily harm, or the commission of a felony/forcible felony.”
After all, Reeves claimed that Oulson “scared him shitless”—apparently from the force of the five-ounce bag of popcorn hitting him in the head. Surveillance video from the theater does show Oulson getting up, standing near Reeves, and throwing the popcorn at Reeves, but Reeves had claimed that “Suddenly he’s virtually on top of me. . . . I’m either saying ‘No, no, no’ or ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa . . .’ He hit me with his fist or something. I assume it was his fist . . .” Other witnesses, including Reeves’s wife, say they never saw Oulson strike Reeves. Oulson’s wife testified that when Reeves came back after complaining to the management, he taunted her husband: “He said, ‘Now you put it away, are you scared?’ ‘Oh, so now you put the phone away.’ And my husband turned around and stood up and said, ‘Dude, what is your problem?’”
The judge at Reeves’s initial hearing said that “throwing an unknown object does not equal taking out a gun and shooting someone.” Several of the twenty-five movie-goers who witnessed the altercation said that Reeves spoke to Oulson first, raised his voice loudly to be heard over the previews, and was “obviously angry,” “nasty-sounding,” and “angry because the guy was texting.” Now here’s the kicker: Reeves had used his own phone to send a message to his son, Matthew, moments before the incident, telling Matthew he was already seated inside the theater.
The Killing of Trayvon Martin
“This guy looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something” is what George Zimmerman, the organizer of the Neighborhood Watch program of the Twin Lakes housing community in Sanford, Florida, told the non-emergency police dispatcher at approximately 7:09 P.M. on the evening of February 26th, 2012. Twenty-eight-year-old Zimmerman was following and referring to seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was returning to his father’s home in the community after having been to the local 7-Eleven to purchase Skittles and an AriZona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail.
In his role as neighborhood watchman, Zimmerman had made numerous calls to the Sanford police between 2004 and 2012, reporting thefts, vandalism, people peering into windows, and a loose pit bull, which prompted him to purchase a Kel Tec PF-9 handgun in 2009. This would be the gun that Zimmerman used to shoot Martin dead during an altercation approximately seven minutes after his chat with the non-emergency police dispatcher.
According to Zimmerman’s account of the event, the altercation began after Martin confronted Zimmerman. Zimmerman was told by the police dispatcher not to follow Martin, but he did anyway to see where Martin was going so as to give a report to police, who were on their way. As Zimmerman was walking back to his truck between homes in the Twin Lakes community, Martin “came out of nowhere” and asked him, “Why are you following me? You got a fucking problem, homie?” After Zimmerman replied No, apparently Martin said, “You got a problem now” and proceeded to punch Zimmerman in the face (which broke his nose), knock him to the ground, and pound his head into the concrete walkway. Zimmerman yelled “Help!” numerous times, prompting Martin to say, “Shut the fuck up!” and “You’re gonna die tonight, motherfucker!” after which Zimmerman shot Martin in the chest with a bullet that penetrated his heart and left lung, killing him.
Much of what Zimmerman claims seems to have been corroborated by eyewitnesses, recordings of 911 calls, and pictures of Zimmerman shortly after the fight. There’s almost universal agreement that Zimmerman exercised bad judgment in not listening to the police dispatcher when she told him not to follow Martin, since, if Zimmerman had not followed Martin, then of course the altercation and subsequent shooting never would have taken place. But, was Zimmerman justified in what one of his lawyers claimed was a “live or die situation in which George exercised classic self-defense”? Given Florida’s stand-your-ground law, Zimmerman was not charged with any crime by Sanford police that winter night in 2012. However, after word of the events got out, many Americans—including Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton—wondered whether this case really was closed, given the fact that Martin was seventeen, unarmed, and of African-American descent. Was Zimmerman, a mixed-race Hispanic, racially profiling Martin with the intent to kill him? After all, he didn’t heed the police dispatcher’s request not to follow Martin.
On June 10th, 2013 Zimmerman went on trial in Sanford, and on July 13, 2013 he was found not guilty of second-degree murder as well as not guilty of manslaughter. Before jurors deliberated, the judge did remind them about Florida’s stand-your-ground law from chapter 776 of the 2011 Florida Statutes: “Mr. Zimmerman had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force.” Zimmerman may have had the right to meet force with force, but it’s questionable whether he should have been following Martin in the first place.
There’s an old principle that many of us may not have heard of by name, but still understand well enough called the principle of double effect. It’s the idea that one can be justified in bringing about some harm or evil result—even killing someone or lots of people—provided that the evil result 1. is not directly intended and 2. isn’t greater than the good result that is intended. There are two effects, results, or consequences then; one (single) is a great or greater good that’s intended, while the second (double) is a lesser evil that isn’t intended.
It’s a controversial principle because oftentimes we know that there’s going to be an evil effect that results from one of our actions, even though we don’t intend it directly. While talking about self-defense in his famous work, Summa Theologica, the great Christian philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), formulated a version of the principle that is still utilized by people, governments, judicial systems, and religions all over the world today:
Nothing hinders one act from having two effects, only one of which is intended, while the other is beside the intention. . . . Accordingly, the act of self-defense may have two effects: one, the saving of one’s life; the other, the slaying of the aggressor.
So, as long as Raylan intended to protect his own life by shooting Tommy Bucks, then the double effect of Bucks being killed (which is a great evil done to him, since he loses his life) is justified. Other well-known—some controversial—actions where the principle of double effect is utilized include:
Here are some other cases of self-defense, or what is claimed to be self-defense:
Ossian Sweet
On September 8th, 1925, an African-American physician named Ossian Sweet moved into his new house at 2905 Garland with his wife and infant daughter in a modest white neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan. It was difficult to unpack dishes with the crowd of angry white folk outside shouting, “Nigger get out!” and “You better leave, Nigger!” Other blacks in recent years had been driven from their newly purchased homes in all-white neighborhoods, and in one case Detroit Police stood by as people threw rocks at a young couple who were being shown a home by a realtor.
Fearing that blacks would lower house values, whites in Detroit formed the Waterworks Park Improvement Association in the early 1920s to oppose blacks moving into formerly all-white neighborhoods. The coppers reluctantly helped out the Sweets, however, and police officers were stationed around their house the evening after they moved in. Ossian also had invited his two brothers and seven other friends to his home to help with the move and serve as extra protection. On the evening of September 9th, a large mob of nearly a thousand people showed up and began making more racist threats. Rocks were thrown at the house, and when folks stepped on the front steps, shots were fired from the upstairs window, and the bullets ended up killing a man named Leon Breiner and wounding another man in the leg. Everyone in the house but Ossian’s daughter was arrested and charged with murder.
The case soon drew the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and renowned attorney Clarence Darrow was brought in to join the defense team. The trial took place in front of an all-white jury, but Darrow argued that all of the defendants were in legitimate danger that night and that Ossian was justified in exercising the right to defend himself, his family, and his home by shooting the attackers. The good news: a hung jury, the case thrown out, and the prosecution gave up on an appeal to re-try Ossian. The bad news: Ossian’s daughter died a year later, his wife and brother both died of tuberculosis before the age of thirty, Ossian went into debt, became depressed, and eventually put a bullet in his head on March 20th, 1960.
Bernie Goetz “Mugged” on the Subway
Rob Arp went to high school in downtown Chicago, a block away from the John Hancock Building on Michigan Avenue, the main drag where people go to shop when they visit the Windy City. He lived outside of Chicago in Cicero (where Al Capone ran the city in the 1920s and 1930s) and so he took the third-rail-powered El (or L) train everyday to school. It was nicknamed “the El” because at certain points it rode on track that was elevated, as can be seen in pictures of Chicago’s downtown Loop area. Literally, hundreds of thousands of people in and around Chicago took the El every Monday through Friday going to work or school, and many more still do today.
On his very first day of school—true story, no bull—he witnessed two robberies: one was a situation where the El doors opened at a stop and a guy ripped a gold chain off of a lady’s neck as he was exiting and she let out a faint “Oh!” just before the doors of the train closed and rode away with her stunned and clutching her neck. Then, within twenty minutes, the second robbery was one where a guy ran past Rob as he was switching trains at an underground transfer station, and the guy grabbed the purse of a lady about ten feet in front of Rob and kept running. She screamed “Hey!” and ran after the robber. The train police actually caught that guy, as Rob noticed him handcuffed and surrounded by coppers with the lady giving her statement just before he got on his next train.
That set the tone for what would be (an at times scary) four years of Rob riding the city train operated by the Chicago Transit Authority twice a day, five times a week, with low-life scumbags all too often stealing things, harassing people, swearing at people, fighting, spraying graffiti, throwing gang signs, pissing on things, and intimidating anyone they thought was easy prey. That was late August of 1984. Four months later, just three days before Christmas, Bernhard Hugo Goetz (pronounced like “gets”) got on the seventh car of a New York City subway train at the 14th Street station stop where several people—including Barry Allen, Troy Canty, Darrell Cabey (all nineteen years old), and James Ramseur (eighteen years old), all with prior criminal convictions—were riding. Allen, Canty, Cabey, and Ramseur were carrying screwdrivers because they were headed to Manhattan to break open video game machines to steal the change.
Dramatically different from the situation today, in the mid-1980s crime in the Big Apple was at an all-time high in the city’s history, and hard-working, law-abiding people were pissed. Remember the Guardian Angels, the dudes with the red berets who rode the New York City subways to deter criminal activities? They were big in the early-to-mid-1980s. Goetz claims he was attacked in 1981 at a NYC subway station while transporting electronic equipment and subsequently purchased a five-shot light-weight .38 Special for protection. He was carrying that .38 Special on the train that fateful day. After the four teenagers surrounded him and one asked him for five dollars, Goetz got up and shot all four of them in a matters of seconds. According to the account given by the New York Court of Appeals:
The first shot hit Canty in the chest; the second struck Allen in the back; the third went through Ramseur’s arm and into his left side; the fourth was fired at Cabey, who apparently was then standing in the corner of the car, but missed, deflecting instead off of a wall of the conductor’s cab. After Goetz briefly surveyed the train scene around him, he fired another shot at Cabey, who then was sitting on the end bench of the car. The bullet entered the rear of Cabey’s side and severed his spinal cord.
All four of the youths lived, but Cabey was left paralyzed from the waist down. Goetz fled and later turned himself in, was tried, and claimed he was merely defending his life. While Goetz was on the lam the media, not knowing who exactly fired the shots, referred to the shooter as the “subway vigilante.” A Manhattan jury eventually found Goetz innocent of attempted murder, assault, and reckless endangerment, but guilty of carrying an unlicensed firearm in the city.
Now, several factors make this case controversial. First, the youths never brandished the screwdrivers and had merely asked Goetz for the five dollars, so this makes Goetz’s self-defense claim suspect. Second, Goetz claimed in his videotaped statement to police that “My intention was to murder them, to hurt them, to make them suffer as much as possible. . . . If I had more bullets, I would have shot them all again and again. My problem was I ran out of bullets.” Third, Goetz mentions that after firing the first four shots, he walked up to Cabey (who was cowering in one of the train seats) and thought to himself, “You don’t look so bad, here’s another” just before firing the last shot of his .38 Special into Cabey, which was the shot that paralyzed him. Fourth, Goetz was white, while all of the youths were black, which effectively divided the nation all throughout the duration of this case and for as long as it was mentioned in the media.
Some have argued that this was a clear-cut case of Goetz being angry and intending to murder the youth; after all, Goetz has claimed as much! Others have argued that Goetz had to shoot the youths for fear of his own life and was intending to defend himself in the process. Interestingly enough, in a November 1985 interview, Cabey stated that the other members of the group planned to frighten and rob Goetz because he “looked like easy bait.” And Canty told the first police officer on the scene, Peter Smith, “We were gonna rob him, but the white guy shot us first.”
In May of 1985, Ramseur held a gun while his friend raped, sodomized, and robbed a pregnant eighteen-year-old woman on the rooftop of a Bronx building. He was caught, served thirteen years in the New York State Department of Corrections system, was released in 2010, and found dead in a Bronx motel room due to a drug overdose. Coincidentally, Ramseur was found on December 22nd, 2011, which was the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Goetz shooting. Allen committed two robberies in 1986 and 1991 (one was chain-snatching just like what Rob witnessed his first day of school on the El), and was sent to jail for four years. Canty was arrested many more times, entered a drug-treatment program, and was charged with assault, robbery, and resisting arrest in an altercation with his common-law wife in August 1996.
In 1996 Goetz was found guilty of reckless behavior for shooting Cabey and was ordered to pay $43 million to the paralyzed man; Goetz filed for bankruptcy soon after. In November of 2013, Goetz was caught trying to sell marijuana to an undercover cop. We’ll leave you with the musings of a blogger from 2009:
If Goetz had been wise, he wouldn’t have fired right away. He should have pulled the gun and backed away; if any of those guys made a move after that, THEN he should have fired. Seriously, I don’t think a bunch of hoodlums would risk death just for a few bucks. This would have saved him the headache of a criminal trial, but still symbolized the whole “subway vigilante” thing.
If It Had Been Your Child, You Would Have Done the Same Thing Too
Google “Leon Gary Plauche video” and you’ll be directed to a YouTube video from Court TV showing a decent-looking, unshaven handcuffed man in his mid-twenties wearing a burnt orange sweatshirt being escorted by two plainclothes officers in handcuffs past a line of payphones in what appears to be an airport. As the handcuffed man gets about halfway down the row of payphones, another man wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses, and light jacket who had been pretending to be making a phone call pulls a gun from his boot and shoots the handcuffed man in the side of the head. You can see the hair on the handcuffed man’s head fly up in the air from the gun blast just before he falls flat on his face dead. The two plainclothes officers then subdue the shooter by pushing him up against the payphone, raising his arm, and grabbing the gun from his hand.
The shooter in the video is Leon Gary Plauche. The handcuffed man he shot dead was Jeff Doucet, who had just been extradited from California and was back in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to face charges that he had kidnapped and sexually assaulted Plauche’s eleven-year-old son three weeks earlier sometime in February of 1984. The local TV station was at Baton Rouge’s airport to film Doucet’s arrival and caught the shooting on tape.
When asked “Why, Gary? Why did you do it?” by one of the officers at the airport, Plauche responded simply, “If it had been your child, you would have done the same thing too.” Apparently, throughout most of 1983 Plauche’s son, Jody, was taking karate lessons from Doucet and Doucet was fondling and molesting the boy. Plauche was charged with second-degree murder. In court, one of the psychologists who examined Plauche claimed that a “voice inside his head was telling him that he had to kill Doucet or else he would continue to abuse and harm his son.” This defense worked, and Plauche was sentenced to five years probation and 300 hours of community service work, which he completed in 1989.
Some were outraged at the verdict claiming that Plauche straightforwardly murdered Doucet. Others, mostly parents, note that Plauche was completely justified in his actions claiming, “It’s a basic law of nature to protect your own, no matter what.” Plauche claims to this day that he did the right thing, and his son now travels around the US giving talks to people about sexual violence and abuse.
Justifiably Killing the Pedophile
Part of the 911 call went like this: “This guy’s going to die! He’s going to fucking die! The ambulance needs to get here! Come on!” The guy being referred to was Jesus Mora Flores. Apparently, Flores was a pedophile, and he did in fact die. Flores died because a twenty-three-year-old father discovered him in the act of raping his five-year-old daughter in the chicken coop on his ranch in Shiner, Texas (about 100 miles east of San Antonio), and beat Flores to a pulp. After the beating, the father realized that Flores was in bad shape and called 911.
The man had sent his son and daughter out to feed the chickens on the ranch in the late afternoon of Saturday, June 9th, 2013. The son came running into the house telling his dad that his sister had been abducted by Flores, a family acquaintance. The father could hear the girl’s screams outside of the coop, and when he went inside found Flores and his daughter naked from the waist down with Flores on top of the girl. At the local hospital later that day, it was confirmed that the girl was sexually assaulted. A grand jury ultimately declined to indict the father for any crime, finding that he was justified in using deadly force to protect his daughter. In Texas, you can use deadly force in order to stop an aggravated sexual assault or sexual assault. “Flores got what he deserved, big time,” said one Shiner native, while another noted, “I would probably have done worse.”
However, some have wondered whether such use of deadly force is in fact justified. Indeed, in such a horrific and unimaginable moment, it’s easy to believe that many parents would have reacted similarly. How could you control yourself from not beating this guy to death? But one or two or three blows probably would have been sufficient to separate Flores from the girl, while the dad pummeled him into unconsciousness, then death. That degree of force seemed unnecessary, many would claim. When all’s said and done, there aren’t any winners in this situation: a man is dead, a father killed someone, and a five-year-old is old enough to remember what happened to her for a very, very long time.