Wrong House

It keeps happening. This time it was a twenty-year old University of South Carolina student who banged on the wrong door at two-o’clock in the morning. Earlier this year, it was a Missouri teenager going to the wrong house to pick up his younger brothers. In rural New York, a car full of young people pulled into the wrong driveway looking for a friend’s house. The Missouri teenager survived. A young woman in the New  York incident was killed. In both those cases, old men with guns have been charged with crimes. Things in South Carolina have ended very differently. Nicholas Donofrio had moved into fraternity house on the same block just a week earlier to start his junior year. It’s still unclear if he was drunk or on drugs. Toxicology tests are pending. It was a fatal mistake.

Columbia police say they got a 911 call from a woman who said there was burglary in progress. When police responded, Donofrio was dead at the front door with a bullet wound in the chest. Police say Donofrio was banging and kicking the front door and trying the door handle. He broke glass around the door and reached in to open it. The man in the house fired once through the glass. Police reviewed evidence at the scene, surveillance video and audio and took witness statements. They brought the case to the prosecutor’s office. It was decided is was a “justifiable homicide”. It falls under South Carolina’s Stand Your Ground law. It says that a person does not have to retreat before using deadly force in self defense when a person is not engaged in unlawful activity and is in a place where he or she has the right to be. In other words, if someone is trying to break into your home, you have the right to defend yourself and your home with deadly force.

Donofrio clearly made a terrible mistake. I have often said male college students are the dumbest people on earth. They do stupid things. He was probably drunk. I’m sure the homeowners were terrified. Under the Stand Your Ground law, they don’t have to be identified. I suspect this will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Donofrio’s parents Lou and Dina have said, “We are proud of Nick. We were lucky to be his parents.” There are no words to describe what this has done to them.

We are a society that has always lived by the gun. But in recent years it has become overwhelming. We live both in love and in fear of guns. They are everywhere. Supporters of the Second Amendment get enraged when someone suggests gun control legislation. Americans are willing to live this way unlike just about every other country in the world. They will argue that the couple in South Carolina had every right to use their legally owned gun under the law. They would be right. But right doesn’t always end well. Many times the gun is the first response instead of the last. I’m not passing judgment on the home owner on the street in South Carolina. I wasn’t there. We, as a society, have to decide what kind of people we want to be. Going to the wrong house shouldn’t be fatal.