Posted on 01/10/2008 10:15:47 AM PST by jaydubya2
HAMMOND | A Hessville woman will not be charged in the shooting death of a man accused of breaking into her home in November and stalking her.
(Listen to the 911 call)
Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter said on Wednesday he was turning down any charges against the woman in the death of Ryan Lee Bergner, 41, considering her actions to be in self-defense and defense of property.
The Nov. 12 shooting of Bergner as he cornered the 51-year-old woman in an upstairs bedroom closet capped a month of escalating terror -- chronicled in a series of police reports filed by the woman -- which included break-ins, vandalism and assaults in her workplace.
They had briefly dated over the summer, but Bergner couldn't accept that she didn't want to be his girlfriend, and wouldn't take "no" for an answer, the woman said.
That fatal Monday night, she was watching television at 10:30 p.m. when she heard a window breaking, and called 911.
An audio recording of her conversation with the emergency dispatcher, from the initial break-in to her escape from the dying Bergner six minutes later, was released by Hammond police on Wednesday.
"I'm so scared," the woman said to the 911 operator, who told her to lock herself in a bedroom until police arrived.
Bergner had already broken into her house two days earlier, she reported to police, destroying a clock-radio and stealing several of her undergarments.
"I heard him turn a light on, a hallway light," she told the dispatcher as she hid in a closet, armed with a pistol a friend had given her for protection.
"What are you doing?" she can be heard asking over the sound of her bedroom door being kicked in. "Stop it! Please stop it! Just stop it!"
Gunshots can clearly be heard on the recording. She later said Bergner was on top of her in the closet, his hands around her throat, choking her.
"What are you trying to do, kill me?" the mortally wounded Bergner asked.
"Are you trying to kill me?"
Police found her in her front yard when they arrived moments later, and found Bergner, wearing black leather gloves and a brown leather jacket, lying partially in the bedroom closet with three bullet wounds to his abdomen, a 9 mm pistol on the bed nearby.
"That tape is absolutely chilling," said Hammond Police Chief Brian Miller, who worked for years as a detective with the department's sex crimes division.
Miller said he is regularly asked to speak at meetings of women's organizations and support groups for victims of domestic violence, and in the future will be taking the recording along with him as an example of what can happen.
"I didn't want it to turn out like this," the woman told The Times the day after the shooting, though she declined to comment for the record on Wednesday's decision by the prosecutor's office.
I feel sorry that the woman had to go through with that and then go through wondering if she’d go to jail because she didn’t simply allow herself to die instead of protecting herself.
I googled on “.45 9mm stopping power”; not a whole lot of people have confidence in the 9mm apparently.
Well, he left his fingerprints and DNA at the scene and was found with some of her valuables in his possession. It was an open and shut case, and he will be in jail until he is an elderly man. That's where I want him, because unlike the Bergner's, I'm not going to ignore the evidence just because the guy was always nice to me.
I would have been saying "I'm armed and I will shoot if you come through that door" at the part where he's trying to break in and she's yellling "Stop it."
But hey...it's easy for me to say that sitting in my safe living room in Illinois with firearm training under my belt. I'm sure this was the first time she had ever been through anything remotely like this, and probably the first time she'd contemplated using a gun.
Oh man, I’m so sorry to hear that.
Did they get the puke?
LOL! That could have gone either way, really. A lot of people take rounds to the gut and a little internal sewing fixes them right up, but if a .45 round hits your descending aorta you'll be dead in a minute or less.
There's a bumper sticker I saw recently and at least one Freeper has it as a tagline: "I carry a gun because I can't carry a cop."
Yeah. He’ll rot ‘til he dies.
Good.
Again, my condolences.
Thanks.
Nice.
What if you're not physically capable of handling a .45? What if the gun itself is too big and/or heavy? I have yet to find a .45 that comfortably fits my hand. Trigger reach is always too long, and if I have to strain on my trigger pull I'm not going to be hitting much.
Gosh, am I screwed if I ever get into a life-and-death confrontation in my home?
The answer is an absolute NO. If you find something that you're comfortable shooting, you'll be more likely to practice with it, and if you're more likely to practice with it, then you'll be able to hit what you're aiming at.
The ".45 or nothing" attitude either creates a false sense of security to the person who owns one (or do the makers of .45 ammunition or firearms include some sort of stopping power guarantee of satisfaction that I'm not aware of?) or creates a false sense of inferiority in the person who doesn't own one.
Sometimes the assailants don't give a rat's patootie about the caliber, so you'd better be able to shoot your weapon of choice well, no matter what it is.
My wife can knock a beer can off a fence post with the same 1911 .45 I use to slaughter hogs, thereby making it the perfect home defense weaopon. Your results may vary.
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