Posted on 04/24/2014 11:07:12 AM PDT by Uncle Chip
LITTLE FALLS, Minn. — A Minnesota man who killed two teenagers who broke into his home can be heard on an audio recording talking to himself for hours after the shooting and at one point, apparently describing the slain teens as "vermin."
Byron Smith, of Little Falls, faces first-degree premeditated murder charges in the deaths of 18-year-old Haile Kifer and 17-year-old Nick Brady on Thanksgiving Day in 2012. Smith, 65, claimed he was defending himself and feared for his life after several break-ins at his home.
Prosecutors, though, say Smith planned the killings. They say he sat in a chair in his basement and waited for the teens to enter his home, instead of calling police.
Smith waited a full day after he shot them before asking a neighbor to call the authorities....
The killings stunned this central Minnesota community and stirred debate about how far people can go to defend their homes. Under Minnesota law, a person may use deadly force to prevent a felony from taking place in one's home or dwelling, but authorities have said Smith crossed a line when he continued to shoot the teens after they were no longer a threat.
Authorities who searched Smith's home after the killings testified Wednesday that they found an audio recorder that was turned on and an operating video surveillance system. The recorder was sitting on top of books on a bookshelf, near a chair where prosecutors say Smith waited for the teens....
Prosecutors also showed images from surveillance cameras that Smith had set up outside his home. The four different camera angles showed Smith leaving his home in his truck at 11:25 a.m. on the day of the killings, then returning on foot at 11:45.
At 12:33 p.m., Brady shows up in a hooded, camouflage jacket ...
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonherald.com ...
Well, good for him. I’m guessing he won’t get burglarized for a couple of weeks. ...... and he definitely won’t get robbed by those two little angels.
On my “give a rats ass” meter I’m getting a zero. F’em , I’ve seen girls and guys murder old people for less. Even if they went there just to rob, sometimes things get out of hand. Don’t want to leave witnesses or just angry words exchanged, but once the old fool submitted to the young punks he was at THEIR mercy.
So those useless parasites were successfully removed and maybe the old fool can live in peace. I don’t see him hunting down anybody but law breakers.
In his 30 years as a State Department security officer one wonders how many times he got to shoot intruders or just had to detain them to his dismay.
He probably couldn't wait to retire so he could shoot those who dared breach his security perimeter.
“The penalty for breaking into a house is not death “
Can be and rightfully so. . .and you say never?
Ah... Well... Aren’t you sweet.
Here I thought you were being judgmental as your raison d’etre today. Seeing as how you are eating up the Leftist spin and drivel with an over-sized spoon.
You may want to retrieve a napkin though, you’ve spilled some down your chin...
Hahahahahahahaha. Oooooops , wrong car
Thrills, drugs or both. All the participants seem middle income. Some burglars escalate for the adrenalin rush. They become very dangerous indeed. This house had three sociopaths in it at one time, IMO.
He wasn't frightened -- he was excited like a hunter in his blind as his prey enter his trap.
He had a rifle. They were unarmed.
He knew they were in his house at least five full minutes before they knew he was home.
He had the drop on them, and they had no options besides getting shot or fleeing.
A normal person would have called the police while these two were cluelessly wandering around on the ground floor.
And a normal person would have stood his ground and shot them if they made a threatening move.
He had far darker motives.
Get well soon.
Cops don’t carry enough ammo for that. Cop hit rate is about 20%. So they would of had to of fired 500 times to get close to a 100 hit mark.
I would incline toward Manslaughter.
If the stories of suffering a series of previous breakins is correct, I could definitely see him snapping under a variation of PTSD.
Still doesn’t validate his actions as being either rational or acceptable. Or defensible as something a person can legitimately do in either a moral or legal sense. It just means that he gets to live out his days in a high security psychiatic facility rather than with the hoods in maximum security gen-pop.
It also is, as someone said earlier, a good object lesson for wannabe home invaders: you really DON’T know what’s waiting for you on the other side of that door or window ...
Yep. Those are not the actions of a man in fear of his life.
it’s tough to lay a trap inside your house. the criminals had to break in first.
as for continuing to shoot... he might not have been prepared for the realities of the results... which might be way he was talking to himself for hours and dehumanizing them by referring to them as ‘vermin’
as far as I’m concerned, once you break into a house, your fate, how it’s delivered and over what period of time, is entirely up to the home owner.
if you don’t want to die a horrible, enlongated death... DON’T DO THE CRIME
The problem here is that he was not surprised by the burglars but knew they were coming and was luring them in by making it look like no one was home all the while watching on his live video.
It’s one thing to then detain them, to tie them up, even shoot them if they don’t cooperate or threaten you, but what the prosecution is showing is that he wanted them to come in so that he could kill them and then claim self defense.
Why does he admit that he executed them, for instance his excuse for the girl is that he didn’t want her to suffer, so he put the pistol under her chin and finished her off, after he had moved her and placed her on the tarp?
Does it occur to people that even psychotic killers and bad guys own homes and get burglarized?
We went through this with that pharmacist in Oklahoma, a few just couldn’t get it through their minds that two robbers met up with a sociopathic killer running a drugstore.
There doesn’t always have to be a good guy, not every story involving use of a gun, has to have a hero.
Prosecutors are evaluated on the basis of their conviction rate. A plea bargain resulting in probation counts as a conviction, and is easier for the prosecutor to obtain than a jail sentence after a trial conviction.
This needs to change. Somebody who has demonstrated that he is a chronic criminal needs to be excluded from plea bargains. After N arrests (N=3 is a good number, I think), it should be mandatory that the prosecutor go for the max penalty from a trial conviction.
Exactly. It seems, from some things that I read here, that once they broke in, their lives were his to do with as he wished, and that if he'd, say, tortured them for a week before killing them, that would have been fine with some.
No longer a threat to whom? Maybe he still felt threatened.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.