Posted on 03/21/2006 1:38:11 AM PST by beaversmom
BATAVIA, Ohio -- A man who neighbours say was devoted to his meticulously kept lawn is charged with murder in the shooting of a 15-year-old boy who apparently walked across his yard.
Charles Martin, 66, of Union Township, near this city about 30 kilometres east of Cincinnati, shot next-door neighbour Larry Mugrage in the chest with a shotgun about 3:30 p.m. Sunday, police said. The youth was pronounced dead at hospital.
Martin was being held without bond yesterday in Clermont County Jail. Police said he told them he had several disputes about neighbours walking on his lawn. But Union Township police Lieut. Scott Gaviglia said Martin had no criminal history and last called police in 2003.
Martin called 911 on Sunday, saying in a calm voice: "I just killed a kid."
He also tells the dispatcher: "It's been going on for five years ... I've been harassed by him and his parents for five years. Today just blew it up."
STUNS NEIGHBOURHOOD
The deadly shooting stunned those in the neighbourhood and students at Glen Este High School, where Martin was a freshman, and grief counsellors were on hand yesterday.
"I think there's a great deal of shock, for two reasons: because of the age of the victim and just how this occurred, killed over some grass," Gaviglia said.
Neighbours said Martin lived alone quietly, often sitting out in front of his one-storey home with its neat lawn, well-trimmed shrubbery and flag pole with U.S. and navy flags flying.
In his fenced backyard, he had several birdhouses and a shed painted like a small red barn with white trim.
That doesn't trouble my sleep any: the kid had a choice. But where I lived, no arms or baseball bats are involved. It would have been a head-on collision between a pickup truck and my mailbox. In the fantasy, a geyser spumes out of his radiator.
Admittedly, in the fantasy the driver then unbuckles his seat-belt and stands on the street scratching his head like Roscoe in the Dukes of Hazard. I don't actually wish the idiot to be thrown through his windshield. But then again, the law is on my side there: since seatbelts are legally mandatory, I'm entitled to assume that all hooligans are properly belted.
I was going to get a large mailbox and lay it face up. Then get one of those little round ones and put it in the middle and fill in the space with cement. Try hitting that with a baseball bat.
Luckily I never did it, I'd probably get sued by some you punk.
She's right; you're being a jerk. Just apologize and make nice.
Errr....build a fence?
I'd feel terrible, of course. But I have a question back to you: are there any trees or telephone poles in front of your house? Are you careful to remove them in case a lady loses control of her car some snowy night? As I see it, the only way to really have a clean conscience is to install a runaway truck ramp with lots of nice soft gravel.
As an aside, your physics is off: it's extremely unlikely that a car would flip under the conditions you describe. Fatal injuries are of course possible.
At my present home, I manage to dodge this whole can of worms by having my mailbox attached to my front door. If someone wants to ram that, I look forward with interest to the results.
Oh, well it all makes sense then. The kid had been accidentally cutting the crass 10 inches or so across the property line between the houses messing up the perfectly shaped rectangle pattern in the grass and making the grass heights uneven by about a half an inch or so between mowing days.
You are right, this guy is wound toooo tight. About 25 years ago we had a neighbor with a meticulous lawn. Our sons played together often. One time my 6 year old son accidentally broke the string on this man's ceiling light fixture in his basement. The neighbor spanked my son. I immediately went down and told this guy he was out of line. His reaction was to threaten to slash our tires with an AX if we ever got one tire on his property. We went to the DA's office and filed a complaint. They couldn't do anything at the time; but, they said it was good to have his threats on record in case anything happened in the future. Luckily there was never any other problem. We just kept our kids away from the wacko's property. When we moved from that neighborhood it was one of the happiest days of my life.
Absolutely. You can't even begin to make the case that he was defending himself and his property if the unarmed victim wasn't even on his property at the time of the killing. Even a rabid libertarian would agree that there's no such thing as a right to use lethal force to exact vengeance. At least, assuming the kid didn't kill someone first.
I have not called you names. There is nowhere in my post that says that ALL OCD people are "psycho." Some left-brained anal-retentive control freaks with compulsion issues indeed are, as this guy apparently is. And these types take it beyond getting their compulsive jollies by trying to scold and shame strangers online. He was upset about grass cutting issues apparently. Luvox probably wouldn't have helped. He wanted to be sick. Suburbs are full of lawn freaks like this. Lock the cell door and throw away the key. He can argue with the prison guards that he can't get the toilets clean enough and would like the other prisoners to turn their boom boxes down.
Good grief...
I listened to the 911 call he made. I saw the POW flag outside his his modest home. I heard him say the young adult ands members of his family had harrassed him for years.
I felt sorry for the guy.
"Note the absence of a sidewalk."
Note also that the kid was shot in the street, not in the guy's yard.
"It is just possible that this kid liked watching the old nut go crazy."
Yeah, and I suspect the old guy enjoyed blowing the little punk away. It's pretty obvious he carefully thought about what he was going to do the next time he caught the kid walking across his yard. I guess he decided the satisfaction of shooting the kid outweighed the fact he would spend the rest of his life in prison for it. He must have really, really, hated that kid.
Nevertheless, juxtaposing "OCD" and "psycho" was likely to offend someone with OCD, and you knew it. We all tell jokes that go a bit far, but when we're called out, hopefully we do the right thing and apologize.
But you didn't. Instead, you taunted BruceysMom with a tasteless question about her underwear, followed by a gentelemanly retort diagnosing her with oppositional defiance syndrome. You're going to have a hard time defending that as a class act. Please show some class now.
They played the 9-1-1 tape on the radio this morning. The guy had no regrets, basically: killed a kid, he's in the yard, come get him.
Shalom. Get some rest. And no more scolding or finger pointing.
That's exactly what I'm thinking.
I've had my own run ins with disrespectful kids and teens in my neighborhood. The incidents in our neighborhood range from skateboarding down other people's driveways, scratching cars, hitting fungo-style with baseball bats and rocks in the street, mailbox and lawn shed destruction, as well as lawn donuts, car racing, and having the passenger in a car drag people's trashcans down the road at high speed. We aren't just talking about walking on someone's lawn here. We're also not talking about a slum. We're talking about a middle-class suburban subdivision.
I don't fly out of the house screaming and cussing. I ask them to comply calmly and then more forcefully as required.
I'm now of the opinion that many if not most kids these days will simply do as they please and, if you as the homeowner, tell them to stop, they will ignore you, flip you off, give you lip, and maybe even escalate the situation.
I've found through personal experience that these little darlings will then go home and "seed" their parents (usually a single mom BTW) to what a maniacal ogre I am so that when I come by to talk to the parents, I'm met with a parent that's now a bigger problem than the kid.
All that said, this old guy will be convicted of murder in some degree or another - rightfully so. But this kid, his friends, and his parents pushed the man's buttons for sure. It dosen't make it right. It just makes it what it is - sad.
Do you have a link to the source of this info. It is not in the article linked to in this thread.
Also someone said that he shot him a second time. I can't find that either.
Thanks :)
"My father walked over and somehow diffused the situation, taking the gun. "
Your Dad has big brass ones.
That's back when men were expected to be men, when the community would try and help people work things out instead of always counting on the police to take care of everything.
Of course now people have such extreme reactions and will shoot someone at the drop of a hat because they have no regard for human life anymore, so that makes it tougher now for people to get involved.
And you take the word of the maniac who shot an unarmed teen that they were "harassing" him?
There is NO evidence of that, but people on this thread are SURE that the kid "deserved it".
Disgusting.
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