The shooter should be locked up!
Sheriff probes self defense claim of white woman who fatally shot Black neighbor in front of kids
Authorities are under intense pressure to bring charges against a white woman who killed a Black neighbor on her front doorstep as they navigate Florida’s divisive stand your ground law that provides considerable leeway to the suspect in making a claim of self defense.
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Lauren Smith, 40, lives across the street from where the shooting happened. She was on her porch that day and saw one of the Owens’ young sons pacing, and yelling, “They shot my mama, they shot my mama.”
She ran toward the house, and started chest compressions until a rescue crew arrived. She said there wasn’t an altercation and that Owens didn’t have a weapon.
“She was angry all the time that the children were playing out there,” Smith said. “She would say nasty things to them. Just nasty.” Smith, who is white, said the neighborhood is “family friendly” and the fact that the shooter is claiming self-defense is “outrageous.”
“I wish our shooter would have called us instead of taking actions into her own hands,” the sheriff said Monday. “I wish Ms. Owens would have called us in the hopes we could have never gotten to the point at which we are here today.”
The sheriff said that since January 2021, deputies responded at least a half-dozen times in connection with the feuding between Owens and the woman who shot her.
“I’m absolutely heart broken,” Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, told The Associated Press. She described the fatal shooting as “so senseless.”
“We’ve seen this again and again across this country,” she said, adding that “it’s really because of lax gun laws and a culture of shoot first.”
Ferrell-Zabala said stand your ground cases, which she refers to as “shoot first laws,” are deemed justifiable five times more frequently when a white shooter kills a Black victim.
http://apnews.com/article/neighbor-feud-fatal-shooting-florida-7da3ef402f2a3b2cd3a1b657821c822b?
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