Posted on 11/26/2012 5:01:34 PM PST by TurboZamboni
A man who killed two teenagers in his home in Little Falls on Thanksgiving Day told investigators he shot and wounded the two at close range before "finishing" them with shots to the head.
Byron David Smith, 64, was charged Monday, Nov. 26, in Morrison County District Court with two counts of second-degree murder without premeditation in the deaths of Nicholas Brady, 17, and his cousin Haile Kifer, 18.
Smith claims Brady and Kifer broke into his home and he was "fearful" they had weapons, according to the criminal complaint.
(Excerpt) Read more at twincities.com ...
Civility begins with 1.) NOT breaking into other peoples' homes and 2.) expecting dire consequences if you do. Alas, because we are becoming less civilized, people who break and enter into strangers' homes are more and more often given a free pass. No consequences but a liberal lawyer and judge who attribute the "mess up" to "corporate greed" and "societal pressures" rather than the individuals' choice to take a life threatening risk against his neighbors' property.
To all the little brats who mourn their buddys' loss, take it as fair warning: You break into someones' home, you'd best be willing to die for the privilege, whether it be slow and steady, or a single shot.
And with that I'll retire to read E.B. Whites' advice on use of the possessive apostrophe.
Finishing them off pushes the limits, at least within the last century or so.
No argument that the concept of private property has been horribly undermined, as has that of justice, by the people who try to tell us it is someone elses' fault.
The house is not that big and surely the girl would have heard the shots in the basement.
Why didn't she run as fast and as far as her little feet could carry her out of the house???
Why would she go down into the basement where the shots came from???
Something about this doesn't sound right.
There is a scenario which makes a lot of sense.
What if she believed that Brady had shot Smith and she came downstairs to see the corpse & discuss where & how to loot the rest of the house? Her coming down the stairs makes a lot of sense if that is what she thought.
My take on the whole thing is that killing the first one was justified. Smith knows he has multiple intruders and can't take a chance on leaving anyone alive behind him. Remember it is Smith's house and he is under attack at that point. Shooting the girl as many times as he wants, from a distance, is justifiable also. Even getting out the pistol after his rifle jams is OK.
The only thing not OK is the "finishing shot" .
yeah, i read more of how he described it. one i think he’s lying and two, there’s something wrong if you’re lying that bad about it.
Civility will in this case mete out some penalty, and that is a good sign. Thanks for the sensible take overall.
On another note - totally unrelated - civility enjoins us to solicit and publish the names of all who receive unearned benefits from the Federal Government, along with how much they receive, while at the same time requiring of them proportionate civil service, whether it be picking up trash, scrubbing sidewalks, or some other common good. If the recipients of this benefaction refuse the same, then they should be either held up to public ridicule, or imprisoned (to perform civil service under duress), or exiled.
What??? you think that emptying your clip into somebody makes you a conservative??? finishing somebody off who is gasping for their breath is the action of a conservative??? eating Thanksgiving dinner while a couple of kids die in your basement is conservatism??? maybe you should go look up the meaning of conservatism.
I didn’t say any of what you are saying I said.
I said that many here buy the liberal media spin on a gun case. I know 1 thing for sure and that is the liberal media will spin a gun case like this.
If you go to the linked source story of this thread, they have the file of the charging papers with the transcript of the shooter’s statement. His own words about what happened.
That is not media spin and the shooter’s story is hinky from beginning to end.
Yep, that's the same thing that cooked that Oklahoma City pharmacist's goose, just a year or two ago.
“and he wouldn’t be having any trouble.”
Thats what happens when you are a nut. You HAVE to talk about it. You LOVE to tell your story!
And yes, he would be having trouble, even with a lawyer. Trouble comes when you have bodies wrapped in tarps, dragged around, you don’t report it until the next day when the cops are knocking on your door, investigating an odd abandoned car belonging to the kids who had been reported missing.
The girl has a rifle shot down low, is peppered with a slew of 22s at algles showing he was standing above her. Oh, and a nice staight up shot under the chin.
Also, the 223 through the guys head, down into the floor.
It’d take quite an amazing story to explain all the evidence that must have been left in that basement, and have it all add up to self defense, justified.
Nuttery and Crackpottery.
Imagine the rest of the State Department. We came, we saw, he died..
Brady did not have a gun.
There is a scenario which makes a lot of sense.
That is even worse than the scenario than the one that Smith tells.
Do you really think that this former security officer for the State Department was cowering in the basement when he heard glass breaking upstairs???
It would have taken some time to break all the glass away from that window before they could have crawled through it. And what would he be doing all that time -- curled up in a corner??? No way. He would have been up those stairs and on top of them in a second with guns drawn.
If he had been burglarized 8 times as he said, he would be angry not fearful. He had probably decided what he would do if he ever caught the burglars.
And why would kids burgling a house be looking down the basement for valuables??? The first place they go for valuables is not the bedroom, or living room, or den, or someplace upstairs -- but they go immediately to the basement??? Hardly the place for valuables for most people.
No way this guy just hid in the basement like a church mouse while someone walked around upstairs. He went upstairs with his gun, brought them down the basement where his tarp was, and executed them.
He didn't want to execute them upstairs because it would have made a bloody mess so he used a tarp even in his basement.
He probably thought that getting rid of two bodies from his basement would be easier than it was. They were probably too heavy and too bloody for him to drag upstairs. So he concocted this story and called a neighbor to call the police.
Not how you get from the shooter’s own statement to what judges and prosecutors may have said. One of these is not like the others.
The man’s own story, in his own words, doesn’t pass the smell test.
If it went down as he described to the police, there was probably enough incriminating physical evidence that lawyering up would have been a less than optimal option. It's likely it would not have taken Dexter to impeach his story.
After what he did, the only rational option would have been to have disposed of the bodies and gone on as if nothing unusual had happened. And hope that the kids hadn't told any of their friends they were planning to rob that old codger in the big house at the end of Elm Street. Because if they had, you can bet the cops would have come knocking with a warrant, substantially raising the clean-up standard.
But this old coot was hardly rational, having apparently been driven over the edge by previous break-ins.
And gunowners will do the same thing — spinning themselves silly trying to justify a 2nd degree murder under the cover of self defense.
Not all of the State Department is up to the standards of Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.
That guy turned out to be a nutcase also, a fake war hero who had never been in a war, he also had a bandaged arm and stories of the shootout in the store that day, the evidence showed that there was no shoot out though, only his firing, no wound either.
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