When a drunk man is in a woman’s home uninvited and is killed, is it acceptable or bad?
Man, that’s tricky. I mean, when the woman does it, it seems acceptable:
“She felt threatened,” says Lt. Lane Byers, Pickens County Sheriff’s Office. “She felt she could not leave the home to get away from him. And she felt she had to defend herself. She used a firearm to do so.”
But when cops do it, it doesn’t seem right:
City police officers shot a man twice with Tasers, then scuffled with him, a friend who witnessed the incident said Monday.
Hours after that Saturday scuffle, Nick Mamino Jr., 41, was dead.
When I read that last story, I reacted immediately with my standard, cops-misusing-tasers outrage, but seeing the first story so soon after has put the incidents into stark relief. In Collinsville, Illinois, the police came to a woman’s home where an unarmed man (with a history of armed criminal action) refuses to leave and runs back into the house. To lock himself into the bathroom and sob? To plead with the woman he loves who has just called the cops on him? Or to get a gun?
Given that and given the subtleties of the home-invader versus home-wouldn’t-leaver storylines that are only available the next day in the paper, I conclude the police were correct in trying to subdue him with less than lethal means which, unfortunately and accidentally, proved fatal to Mamino.
The woman who killed her home intruder will receive her recognition in Kim du Toit’s Department of Righteous Shootings. Meanwhile, the police in Collinsville will get pilloried for the crime of enforcing the law while law enforcement officials and for the ultimate results of Mamino’s suspect actions.
