A Long Beach, Ca., man has a message for one half of the intruders who ransacked his Bixby Knolls home on Tuesday night.
“I shot her so that’s going to leave a message on his mind for the rest of his life,” 80-year-old Tom Greer said.
The ‘her’ he’s identifying is the woman he fatally shot during an attempted robbery at his home. Greer said he caught the woman and the man accompanying her in the middle of a late-night break-in in the upscale neighborhood.
“When I went in there, they tackled me,” Greer told NBC4 Wednesday. “Both of them jumped up on top of me.”
What the intruders didn’t know was that Greer had his .22-caliber Smith and Wesson nearby.
“I come back and they see me with a gun, and they run,” he said.
The man escaped, but the woman fell after being struck by Greer’s gunfire in an alley behind the house.
“She says, ‘Don’t shoot me, I’m pregnant! I’m going to have a baby!’ And I shot her anyway,” Greer said.
When asked what he saw happen to the woman after he fired shots, Greer responded: “She was dead. I shot her twice, she best be dead … (The man) had run off and left her.”
Greer, who told NBC News that he has no regrets about the shooting, did mention that he never killed before. Long Beach police said they were investigating the incident. It was not immediately clear whether any charges would be filed against Greer for the shooting.
“Investigators have to look at both sides of this coin,” said legal analyst Royal Oakes. “On the one hand a frail man in his 80s is being attacked in his own home by intruders, he has a right to self-defense. On the other hand, he did shoot a person who was trying to get away, so he wasn’t in imminent danger himself and the law says you can’t shoot somebody under those circumstances.”
We’ll keep you updated with the latest.
SOURCE: NBC | VIDEO SOURCE: YouTube
