Kevin Monahan, 65, shot 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis after a car she was riding in with friends made a wrong turn on his property
A man was convicted of second-degree murder Tuesday for fatally shooting a young woman when the SUV she was riding in mistakenly drove up his rural driveway in upstate New York.
A jury found Kevin Monahan, 66, guilty of second-degree murder for shooting 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis on a Saturday night last April after she and her friends pulled into his long, curving driveway near the Vermont border while they were trying to find another house.
The group’s caravan of two cars and a motorcycle began leaving once they realized their mistake. Authorities said Monahan came out to his porch and fired twice from his shotgun, with the second shot hitting Gillis in the neck as she sat in the front passenger seat of an SUV driven by her boyfriend.
Per the NBC article, it took them an hour to arrest the guy:
When officers arrived at Monahan’s house to investigate the shooting, he refused to come out, Murphy said. Authorities spoke with him through a 911 dispatcher and in person for about an hour before he was taken into custody, according to the sheriff.
How wild is that
That sounds like good police work. They knew where the person was, went to the area, and used their words to resolve the situation. If only all cops could show this kind of restraint and patience when apprehending a suspect…
He wasn’t an unarmed black person so they couldn’t shoot him.
While police shooting black people is a problem, police not shooting white people is a lot less problematic.
I know what you’re trying to say, but man if it doesn’t sound wrong!
Understandable. This one might actually shoot back.
Dude is obviously white.
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Just like Waco… oh wait.
America. Yay.
Execute the motherfucker to show these fucks the barrel points both ways. Set an example. Fucking lunatics.
Oh no he won’t be able to vote for tump
Tump 4 pesident!
Wheel of Fotune
Who is radicalizing the elderly? Oh yeah, FOX News and the culture war bullshit
What is this? Real life BEEF?
Good. What kind of a fucking psychopath sees a car of lost young people and decides, instead of offering directions or at worst leaving them the fuck alone, that they deserve assault with a deadly weapon?
Goddamn deranged.
A Trump voter.
Well that’s one less that can’t vote for him.
Which itself is kinda fucked up but that’s a separate issue.
This is the nature of widespread gun ownership. Owning a gun turns every argument, every perceived wrong, every bruised ego into a potentially deadly situation. Buying a gun, “for protection,” is the dumbest fucking statement I’ve ever heard. Increasing the number of guns laying around ALWAYS creates a more dangerous environment.
How are you going to protect yourself from threats?
Can you fight?
I’m going to start by determining whether or not said “threats” are actually threats to begin with.
Because most of them aren’t. Most gun nuts (disclaimer: I could probably be defined by some standards as a gun nut myself) have this nutty pathological notion that every single person, shadow, and tiny thing that goes bump in the night is personally out to get them. Given the overwhelming majority of non-gun-nut people who do not, in fact, get got on a daily basis despite not even having a gun to defend themselves we can actually conclude that this is just unfounded paranoia.
Just saying.
Yikes, it’s crazy the mental gymnastics you’re willing to go through to avoid admitting you can’t defend yourself.
I wrote a post on Nextdoor.com about this sort of situation. “Use of force” laws in my state, with a few easy-to-digest links and quotes.
Post basically said, “Your rights may not be what you think they are, and if you fuck up, you may find yourself in a concrete and steel box for life.”
Nothing combative, controversial, derogatory, political or non-factual. Shot down within 30-minutes for being “insulting”. Yeah. LOL, I even quoted Masad Ayoob, a world-class expert on the subject, and quite conservative if you read between the lines. Not good enough around here.
I’m a LiberalGunNut™ who studies these things. I have guns at the ready, in my home, and sometimes on my person. It behooves me to know the law.
Part of the reason I wrote that post:
A man had been seen on another man’s lot fucking about, trying to get in an empty trailer. A lot next door, not the shooter’s domicile.
Next night, the shooter setup a chair just inside the tree line and hunted. When the other man came back, he popped 5-rounds of 5.56 at him (AR-15). Hit him a time or two, guy lived.
Next day the cops question the shooter. He lies, gets his story mixed up, gets arrested for 2nd-degree attempted murder. Well, fucking obviously!
About 40% of the Nextdoor.com comments defended the shooter. To sum: The homeowner saw a man trying to break into an empty trailer, on the homeowner’s land, hid himself the next evening and decided to execute this man for trespass when he came back. Think on that. Death for breaking into an empty trailer.
I’ll tell you what my conceal-carry instructor told us, a very conservative gun nut. “If you pull your weapon, you’re shooting to kill. Whatever situation you’re trying to stop, be aware, think, is it worth 20-years, maybe life, behind bars? Because that may well be the outcome, not matter how justified you think you are in the moment.”
I made a post, as a lawyer, about some of the common law rules for self defense, five months ago, and I still get replies from people who don’t like the truth:
Deadly force is never authorized to protect property.
An intruder standing in your living room with no weapon or other outward sign of aggression is not a deadly threat and you will be charged with murder if you kill him.
People cannot handle this.
I had quoted this in my post:
“In the anti-gun Spokane newspaper, internet comments indicated that many people had the clueless idea that Gerlach had shot the man – in the back – to stop the thief from stealing his car. One idiot wrote in defense of doing such, “That ‘inert property’ as you call it represents a significant part of a man’s life. Stealing it is the same as stealing a part of his life. Part of my life is far more important than all of a thief’s life.”
Analyze that statement. The world revolves around this speaker so much that a bit of his life spent earning an expensive object is worth “all of (another man’s) life.” Never forget that, in this country, human life is seen by the courts as having a higher value than what those courts call “mere property,” even if you’re shooting the most incorrigible lifelong thief to keep him from stealing the Hope Diamond. A principle of our law is also that the evil man has the same rights as a good man. Here we have yet another case of a person dangerously confusing “how he thinks things ought to be” with “how things actually are.”
As a rule of thumb, American law does not justify the use of deadly force to protect what the courts have called “mere property.” In the rare jurisdiction that does appear to allow this, ask yourself how the following words would resonate with a jury when uttered by plaintiff’s counsel in closing argument: “Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant has admitted that he killed the deceased over property. How much difference is there in your hearts between the man who kills another to steal that man’s property, and one who kills another to maintain possession of his own? Either way, he ended a human life for mere property!”
― Massad Ayoob, Deadly Force - Understanding Your Right To Self Defense"
So guy claims he felt threatened, didn’t call cops, grabbed gun instead and expects people aren’t just going to assume he’s being a gun nut when he acts exactly like one?
Felt threatened in the time it took them to turn around. Jesus tapdancing christ on a cracker what a fucking snowflake with a hair trigger.
How does somebody like this make it through the day without meds?!?
By stroking his guns, probably.
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Exactly. My dog just barks at people turning around in the driveway. They turn around; my dog thinks he won.
Your dog obviously needs a gun.
He claimed the gun just went off when he tripped and fell. Fortunately the jury didn’t buy his defense.
lol wtf
