Authorities are considering whether to charge an Indiana homeowner who they say shot and killed a woman working as a house cleaner after she mistakenly went to the wrong address.
Police officers found 32-year-old Maria Florinda Rios Perez dead just before 7 a.m. Wednesday on the front porch of the home in Whitestown, an Indianapolis suburb of about 10,000 people, according to a police news release. She was part of a cleaning crew that had gone to the wrong address, the release said.
Rios Perez’s husband, Mauricio Velazquez, told WRTV in Indianapolis that he and his wife had been cleaning homes for seven months. Velazquez said he was standing with her at the home’s front door on Wednesday morning but didn’t realize she had been shot until she fell into his arms, bleeding.
Random woman standing on my patio with cleaning equipment. Better start blasting before I figure out what is actually happening.
This is a straight-up second-degree murder.
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Perhaps cabin fever? If someone holes up for months at a time inside their home, paranoia and delusions unavoidably take over. Add in unhealthy media such as fox news and the like, then anyone showing up at the door would become a threat.
I don’t think they deserve any excuses.
Possible explanations, not excuses.
It’s not an excuse to evade punishment, but a reason to pursue change. If we know and understand how the situation happened, we can take steps to minimize future occurrences.
Appreciate you trying to share perspective, and you’re right that the current climate of selling fear begets violence. That said, the next step is to hope that the perpetrator is penalized to the full extent of the law because anything less normalizes this reaction.
I wonder if there is a name for someone who kills someone who shows up at their door, even if they thought that person was a threat.
Dunno the name of the person, but there is a law in some places commonly known as the castle doctrine.
I meant that they are still a killer. Even if they are deemed incompetent to stand trial, they’ve taken a life. Yes, castle doctrine exists, but in most other places the wording is “reasonable force”. As in, it would be unreasonable to attack and kill someone unarmed at your door regardless of what you thought their intentions were.