If you interrupted a crime, there is no crime. That’s the law.
Wait, what? That doesn’t make sense.
That’s the law. You have to complete a crime for there to be a crime.
Whatever Avery’s intent was, he did not complete his intent. The most that he could have been charged with was some trespassing crime. He could not have been charged with burglary or any theft, because there was none, even if that was his intent when he entered the premises unlawfully.
At worst, he was facing a penalty of being a nuisance, like trespassing. Hardly a crime that is worth pointing a shotgun to. You just tell the guy to get lost because the cops were called.
I think this is why they use the term "suspect." Often a cop stops someone who they think committed a crime, but for which they do not yet know for sure.
So you know this is the same guy that's been in that house in the middle of the night four or five times in the last few months, and you know a bunch of valuable stuff has been stolen, including a 9mm pistol.
While it could be someone else who has stolen that stuff, it's very likely that this guy is the one doing it because he keeps coming back. You especially know this if you were a police officer that worked cases involving this fellow, which the elder McMichael did.
So there is reasonable suspicion. He is a "suspect." At that point they knew for sure he committed a minor crime, but they didn't know if he had committed a more serious crime, and I think most people would see the probability as being very high that he did.
If you had to have proof before you stopped a suspect, the majority of suspects would never be stopped.
They had probable cause to believe a more serious crime had been committed by this suspect.