Bizarre News

Imagine this....you are a mother of two sons. It's a weekday afternoon and you are home with the boys while your husband is a several houses down the road, working on a house he's rehabbing. Suddenly, you hear a commotion outside. Someone is calling your younger son's name, trying to get him to come out of the house.

The next thing you hear is something pelting your house. Your sense of panic starts to rise. Your oldest son grabs a baseball bat and goes to the front door to investigate. He opens it to find up what witnesses will later describe as "twelve to thirty" people on your front lawn, all looking to fight.

You grab one of your husband's hunting rifles to defend both your sons and your home. Neighbors will hear a melee, and several will call 911 to report a fight in progress. Your husband hears about a problem and comes running down the street.

He and other neighbors will report to police that he had to literally fight his way through his own front lawn to reach his family.

You and your boys are clearly outnumbered. Even at the lower end, twelve teenagers on your front lawn, on your property, who refuse to leave, who want to jump your son, pose a serious threat.

Your younger son also grabs one of your husband's hunting rifles. He joins you and his brother at the front of the house.

Shots are fired. At this point, no one is certain if they were warning shots, or if you were trying to kill a trespasser, before he killed you or one of your sons.

The police receive calls on their radios. The 'fight in progress' has been changed to 'shots fired.' They arrive to discover that two of the trespassing teenagers have been hit. A 15-year old has been injured. A 16-year old will die.

What comes next is a quick and bizarre application of the law. You and your younger son are arrested, booked, and held in police custody pending bond. Yours is set at $1 million.

Sound too strange to be true? This is exactly what happened in a St. Louis, Missouri suburb last night. And mother and son are still in police custody today.

Rather than being treated as crime victims, they are being held as the perpetrators of a crime. St. Louis County police seem far less concerned that their suburban home was literally stormed by a gang of teenagers seeking to do serious bodily harm to one or more of the residents. Even at the lowest estimate of twelve teens, they could have easily killed the boy they sought to fight.

Never mind that they were trespassing; that the older son with the baseball bat first told them to leave the property. No doubt the rifle-wielding mother and younger son did the same before things took a turn for the worse and shots were fired.

I don't know about the rest of you, but if I opened my front door to find an unruly mob, of any age, I would panic. Mere seconds seem to have truly counted here. Perhaps mom had to make the decision to either take a few of the precious seconds to grab a rifle to defend her older son at the front door, or call the police for help.

Maybe she thought for a nanosecond about the response time such a call would take, and her maternal instinct kicked in and she chose to take the immediate action of aiding her sons. Maybe she made the wrong choice. But it seems that, in the heat of a literal battle, this is some serious Monday-morning quarterbacking.

Should she and her son be in jail this morning? Their home was literally under siege. And the trespassers refused to leave, instead escalating the situation. Initially, when no one in the home answered the taunts and threats coming from the front lawn, they began pelting the house with rocks.

What would the gang do next? Were they themselves armed? What lengths were they willing to take to get to this son? All of this had to be running through the mother's mind.

The entire situation is irrational. But few, certainly not the St. Louis County police, seem concerned about what the intent of the "twelve to thirty" young men on the front lawn last night.

Any reasonable human being would feel that his or her life was in danger. Certainly, a parent reads that situation with an even greater sense of urgency--the sharp pang of instinct that causes one to protect a child or children, at any cost.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has this account:

In an interview Monday evening, King [the father] told a reporter he had given police a surveillance video recording of the incident. He said he installed the camera at his home after past harassment.

Records show that St. Louis County police were called to the Kings' home 10 times over the past year, for a variety of problems, including a burglary, fights and destruction of property. Officers wrote reports in only two incidents; copies were unavailable Tuesday.

Michael King Sr. said his family has been targeted for years because he is an outspoken community activist who tries to combat crime. He said he legally owns the guns involved and used them for hunting.

Before writing this, I spent the morning researching the gun laws in Missouri. If you'd like to see for yourself, click here to download a pdf version. Really, it's a mere three pages. A quick read.

Neither of the so-called offenders violated the state's gun laws. Early news reports last night pointed out that discharging a weapon in St. Louis County is legal if one feels that one's life is in danger.

What reasonable person would not have felt his or her life was in danger in that scenario--outnumbered four-to-one, or ten-to-one, depending on the accounts. So where is the disconnect?

It is highly unlikely that this family will be able to raise the money to free the mother and son on bail. Not to mention financing the undoubtedly lengthy legal battle in front of them.

They will first need to hire a criminal defense attorney to address the charges filed by the Prosecuting Attorney in St. Louis County. No doubt the bottom-feeding families of the actual perpetrators in this case will file civil charges against the family as well.

If you are just as baffled and concerned by what you're reading, and want to make your thoughts known, share them with the Prosecuting Attorney. You can email the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at letters@post-dispatch.com