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.
http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060321/NEWS01/603210334/-1/CINCI
Picture caption:
The Hawthorne Drive home at left is where Charles Martin lives in Clermont County's Union Township. Larry Mugrage, 15, lived with his family in the house at right. Prosecutors say the boy was in the street when he was shot at 3:21 p.m. Sunday.
http://www.wcpo.com/news/2006/local/03/19/uniontwp_shooting.html
911 Text:
Dispatcher: Okay, so what'd you do?
Martin: I shot him with a 410 shotgun twice.
Well, there you go. That explains his lack of common sense.
No wait, he was bullied for being so old and only being a freshman. He should be a senior at his age.
I think you got some of the facts wrong about the Carl Rowan incident.
IIRC, his son was visiting from out of town. His son was a LEO of some sort and had a pistol with him. I think the pistol was a .22 or .32, some really small caliber.
Rowan was awakened in the middle of the night when some kids jumped the fence in his back yard and went swimming or something like that. Rowan got up and grabbed his son's pistol and saw a kid standing at his back door, maybe even trying to open the door (the kid may have actually been in his house at the time, I can't remember). He shot the kid but the kid wasn't killed.
Rowan was not charged with any crimes, as he stated that the kid was "menacing him" or some such, so they deemed it a self-defense situation. Rowan acted appropriately in the way he handled the situation.
The ridiculous part about the whole thing was that he should have been willing to change his opinin about gun laws after that, but he stubbornly refused to change his mind. He basically said that he did the right thing, he had no regrets, but that didn't mean it was okay for anyone else to do that. Typical liberal double standard.
Thanks for the quick response.
Easy Does It :)
What you said - - BUMP!
I have taught my boys from toddlerhood to never, ever be a bully.
Here is yet another case of the bully finally messing with the wrong psychopath.
Sorry you feel that way. My husband grew up next to a guy like this. His neighbor was psycho. The neighbor and his wife would routinely throw dishwater over the fence onto the kids while they were playing basketball in their own driveway.
If a ball ever went over the fence, you could not retrieve it from the neighbor, so they built a special net to try to keep the ball from going the neighbors way.
This guy would call the police if someone parked in front of his house on the public road.
He would climb up on his antenna and stare at the frequently gathered family and friends in the backyard by my husband.
If you ever cut across the corner too short to his yard, he would be out there screaming at you.
He drove stakes into the yard at the property line right next to husbands driveway, so when people got out of their cars, if they werent extremely careful and 100% on top of things, you were likely to become impaled on his stakes.
He threatened my young children (5 or 6 yo)with a gun when they ran for a ball inside his yard. My in-laws lived next to this goon for 20+ years. He was a miserable old fart who never had a friend over and even his own kids seldom visited.
I don't care how much this kid may have goaded him, there is NO EXCUSE for murdering someone because they walked on your grass. If the grass was so damn special he should have put a fence up.
My physic may indeed be off, but that isn't really the point as you acknowledged. Rather it is the potential for death.
Now, my personnel opinion aside, this is just an example of how the courts (state) would view this issue.
Trees are part of nature and an expected hazard. Telephone poles are an expected hazard as well. A concrete mailbox is not. For example, if you go to the ball park and are hit by a baseball that went wild after being hit by the batter, you have no grounds to sue anyone. The risk of getting hit by a baseball at a ball game is an expected hazard. Now, if one of the players intentionally threw the baseball in the stands and you are hit with it, well you have grounds to sue the thrower. It can not be reasonably expected to have a baseball intentionally thrown at you during a ball game if you are a spectator in the stands.
Likewise, if you are driving on the road, you can expect trees, and telephone poles, and even mailboxes. However, a reinforced concrete mailbox is built with the intent of damaging vehicles that may run into it and would not be reasonably expected.
One last point, although a clean conscience is a noble goal, it is not the intent of the law. You may have clean conscience setting up a hazard, assuming if the individual doesn't break the law, the hazard won't hurt anyone. However, the law is not concerned with your conscience, but rather the potential impact of your actions and whether you could have reasonable foreseen them.
In the cases describe, I think it is reasonable to assume the intent of the builder of the reinforced mailbox was to damage a vehicle and a rational person could foresee the potential danger of the reinforced mailbox.
Words fail me.
In this case it seems like he was waiting for the kid, caught him walking across the grass, shot him with a shotgun (slug) from a distance of some 20 or 30 feet (as described in a post above) and then walked the distance and fired point blank again (a second time!). That's not "self-defense" in any book.
If the kid was postrate in the street, that's not a good crime scene for the shooter.
Umm, no you aren't.
Yeah, but the law is wrong about some of this. For example, putting man-traps inside your home isn't allowed--as if the burglar is entitled to expect decent working conditions.
If property rights were properly respected, it would be allowed to put land-mines on your property, assuming only that proper precautions were taken to prevent someone, say, entering your property by accident. In a fenced and posted property, a minefield makes perfect sense.
LOL!! You've just earned 10,000 frequent-flyer miles to hell for that one.
Me too. I've tried hook down, but it just doesn't work.
Incidents like this may explain why many elderly people self-segregate into retirement communities where children are forbidden to stay for more than overnight. In a society where many parents refuse to discipline their children irrespective of the infraction of law or decency and there is little effective legal recourse against teenage or child vandals, such a retreat is a reasonable reaction.
You are exactly right. The old adage that good fences make good neighbors is sound. (Now if we could only convince the President and Congress to build a good fence on our border with Mexico!)
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