Posted 11/15/2007 05:18:00 PM by Douglas

In Texas, if you shoot someone breaking into your home, after dark, I think the governor gives you medal of freedom. That's not the case here. Listen to the 911 tape. Listen to the 911 operator try to talk some sense into this guy. Listen to the guy cock his shotgun so the operator can hear it, as he runs outside to his neighbor's yard to kill those two guys. He's going down.

In the minutes before the fatal shootings, Pasadena police said the man called 911 and reported that he had heard glass breaking next door and saw two men entering the home through a window. Still on the phone with police, the man, believed to be in his 70s, saw the suspects leaving from the back of the home.

"I'm getting my gun and going to stop them," the neighbor told the dispatcher during the 2 p.m. call, according to Vance Mitchell, a spokesman for Pasadena police. "The dispatcher said, 'No, stay inside the house; officers are on the way.'

"Then you hear him rack the shotgun. The next sound the dispatcher heard was a boom. Then there was silence for a couple of seconds and then another boom."

After the shotgun blasts, the telephone line went dead. But the neighbor called police again and told a dispatcher what he had done.

When police arrived moments later, they found two dead men in the 7400 block of Timberline Drive. One was across the street, and the other had collapsed two houses down behind a bank of mailboxes in the Village Grove East subdivision.

That's not defense. In Texas, we call that capital murder. Texas law is pretty clear in that you can use deadly force in defending your life or your property. What you can't do is play judge, jury and executioner when someone breaks into your neighbor's house and is no threat to you, your safety, or your property.

Capt. A.H. "Bud" Corbett said the neighbor told investigators that he knew the next-door residents were not home. The man told investigators that he encountered the pair when they exited his neighbor's through a gate leading to the front yard.

Corbett said the neighbor asked the men, one of which was carrying a white bag, to stop, but they did not.

So he had to kill them? I can't imagine an unarmed burglar not crapping his pants if some guy gets the drop on him with a 12-gauge and puts a shot in the dirt: At that point you know he means business. But to kill one guy, and the other guy across the street? That's excessive.

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