An Open Garage, a Dead Exchange Student, and a New Debate on Self-Defense

[Norm dePlume]

A man named Kaarma?

An Open Garage, a Dead Exchange Student, and a New Debate on Self-Defense

MISSOULA, Mont. — Teenagers call it garage hopping. The goal was to sneak into an open garage, steal some beer or other items and slip away into the night. It was dumb and clearly illegal. It was not supposed to be deadly.

Around midnight on April 27, a 17-year-old exchange student from Germany named Diren Dede left the host home where he played Xbox and drained cans of Sprite to set off with a friend through his dark hillside neighborhood. They passed a home whose garage door hung partially open. Using a cellphone for light, Mr. Dede headed in.

Inside the house, motion sensors alerted Markus Kaarma to an intruder’s presence. Two recent burglaries had put Mr. Kaarma and his young family on edge, his lawyer said, and he grabbed a shotgun from the dining room and rushed outside. He aimed into the garage and, according to court documents, fired four blasts into the dark. Mr. Dede’s body crumpled to the floor.

Although Mr. Kaarma has been charged with deliberate homicide, Mr. Dede’s death has set off an outcry an ocean away in Germany, exposing the cultural gulf between a European nation that tightly restricts firearms and a gun-loving Western state. In his defense, Mr. Kaarma is expected to turn to Montana laws enacted five years ago that allow residents more legal protections in using lethal force to defend their homes.

[gary m]

On one hand you have "play stupid games, win stupid prizes", but exiting your home with a shotgun and blasting away in the dark is not what I personally would consider to be SYG.
There did not appear to be an imminent threat to Kaarma or his family so while I would not convict of murder, negligent homicide appears proper.

[Michele]

Around midnight on April 27, a 17-year-old exchange student from Germany named Diren Dede left the host home where he played Xbox and drained cans of Sprite to set off with a friend through his dark hillside neighborhood. They passed a home whose garage door hung partially open. Using a cellphone for light, Mr. Dede headed in.

Inside the house, motion sensors alerted Markus Kaarma to an intruder’s presence. Two recent burglaries had put Mr. Kaarma and his young family on edge, his lawyer said, and he grabbed a shotgun from the dining room and rushed outside. He aimed into the garage and, according to court documents, fired four blasts into the dark. Mr. Dede’s body crumpled to the floor.

Imo, there should be common sense and understanding that tells someone that this was a tragic accident..until the last two sentences.

We are gun owners. My husband is a serious gun collector. We live in the country where it could take a while for help to arrive so we have our own defense to use if we have to. I can't think of a circumstance where we would shoot once into a dark garage, let alone shooting four times. This was negligence.

[Norm dePlume]

The background to this is that the man's garage had been burgled a couple of times (they stole his weed) and he set up a baby monitor webcam with motion detection to raise an alarm in the house and purposely left the garage door partly open as a trap for prospective burglars.

[phillygirl]

That's a shame. Depending on what the prior burglaries were (home invasion vs. just stealing some stuff) I think his actions in going out to the garage and blinding aiming into the darkness were reckless.

on edit: I started the post awhile ago before there were other responses. I should just say ditto to the above.

[Novaheart]

Florida's Castle Doctrine requires that the intruder have made "unlawful and forcible entry" to the home. While I am not aware of it ever being an issue of "Did you lock the front door?" I am also not aware of any incident in which the front door was standing open when the intruder entered. By the same token, an open garage cannot possibly give resistance to entry precluding any force used for that purpose.

So what we have is a man firing a shotgun into a de facto curtilage, in the dark, with knowledge that a person or animal of unknown identity and intent was in there. Voluntary manslaughter, reckless disregard.

[Gramps]

Florida's Castle Doctrine requires that the intruder have made "unlawful and forcible entry" to the home. While I am not aware of it ever being an issue of "Did you lock the front door?" I am also not aware of any incident in which the front door was standing open when the intruder entered. By the same token, an open garage cannot possibly give resistance to entry precluding any force used for that purpose.

So what we have is a man firing a shotgun into a de facto curtilage, in the dark, with knowledge that a person or animal of unknown identity and intent was in there. Voluntary manslaughter, reckless disregard.

This borders on the laws that preclude setting a deadly trap.

The missing ingredient is the trip wire.

[Gingersnap]

This looks dicey to me. You can't entice criminals on to your property and then "punish" them. That's completely illegal. Joe Biden's advice aside, normal people don't just blast away with shotguns when they have no line of sight. This seems like manslaughter at the least.

Now, I have no real sympathy for the victim from a common-sense point of view. When you interject yourself uninvited into a person's home (most people see an attached garage as part of the home), then you are running a substantial risk that the owner will react badly.

[Norm dePlume]

It would appear that the open garage door doesn't have much legal significance as far as Montana's castle doctrine goes.

Unarmed and Gunned Down by Homeowner in His ‘Castle’

KALISPELL, Mont. — The last mistake Dan Fredenberg made was getting killed in another man’s garage.

It was Sept. 22, and Mr. Fredenberg, 40, was upset. He strode up the driveway of a quiet subdivision here to confront Brice Harper, a 24-year-old romantically involved with Mr. Fredenberg’s young wife. But as he walked through Mr. Harper’s open garage door, Mr. Fredenberg was doing more than stepping uninvited onto someone else’s property. He was unwittingly walking onto a legal landscape reshaped by laws that have given homeowners new leeway to use force inside their own homes.

Proponents say the laws strengthen people’s right to defend their homes. To others, they are a license to kill.

That night, in a doorway at the back of his garage, Mr. Harper aimed a gun at the unarmed Mr. Fredenberg, fired and struck him three times. Mr. Fredenberg crumpled to the garage floor, a few feet from Mr. Harper. He was dead before morning.

Had Mr. Fredenberg been shot on the street or sidewalk, the legal outcome might have been different. But on Oct. 9, the Flathead County attorney decided not to prosecute, saying that Montana’s “castle doctrine” law, which maintains that a man’s home is his castle, protected Mr. Harper’s rights to vigorously defend himself there. The county attorney determined that Mr. Harper had the right to fetch his gun from his bedroom, confront Mr. Fredenberg in the garage and, fearing for his safety, shoot him.

This case seems more defensible in that the intruder was there to confront the guy and may well have intended to assault him. It's self-defense as opposed to defense of property. But the open garage door made no difference in that case.

[Novaheart]

It would appear that the open garage door doesn't have much legal significance as far as Montana's castle doctrine goes.



This case seems more defensible in that the intruder was there to confront the guy and may well have intended to assault him. It's self-defense as opposed to defense of property. But the open garage door made no difference in that case.

Interesting.

[Novaheart]

It would appear that the open garage door doesn't have much legal significance as far as Montana's castle doctrine goes.



This case seems more defensible in that the intruder was there to confront the guy and may well have intended to assault him. It's self-defense as opposed to defense of property. But the open garage door made no difference in that case.

Sidenote - Kalispell is where Randy Weaver lives.

[phillygirl]

I don't think the issue is the open garage door...it's what Gramps said...the trap was set. If the homeowner had the door open for whatever reason, an intruder comes, and the homeowner is fearful for his life...self defense. In this case, however, the homeowner clearly wanted to shoot whoever walked through that door, not to defend himself, or even to defend his property, but for revenge. I believe intent is important.

[Adam]

The background to this is that the man's garage had been burgled a couple of times (they stole his weed) and he set up a baby monitor webcam with motion detection to raise an alarm in the house and purposely left the garage door partly open as a trap for prospective burglars.

That's not determined as fact. They claim that they kept the door open so that they could easily exit to the outside to smoke.


I don't think that one can draw a straight line from a purse with readily-identifiable items placed at the back of the garage (clearly out of plain view) to "entrapment" into getting shot. Particularly after a couple of other robberies, it's a very reasonable response to put something out there that would readily identify a thief if they're caught, no different than dye packs on money in banks. Police use exactly that technique every day in this country, and it's considered completely legal. The fact is that the kid did illegally enter the garage, and his accomplice admitted that he did so with the specific intent of robbing those people and that he had done so multiple times in the past. The kid is hardly an angel here: he's demonstrably been involved in what can only be accurately described as a crime spree.


Was Kaarma "looking to get some?" Yeah, almost certainly. Is he a responsible gun owner and user? Nope. "Firing blind" is precisely why it's such an incredibly bad idea to go about firing "warning shots," no matter what the hell fucktard Biden says. Indeed, this situation is precisely why it's such a phenomenally dumb idea to have this "warning shot" law in Florida: transport this entire situation to Tallahassee, and the homeowner need only say "well, I was just firing warning shots; it's not my fault that I couldn't see him," and under the law as they have now passed it, that is complete exoneration. Dumb, DUMB idea.

Did Kaarma "trap" this kid into getting shot? I think that's going to be very, very hard to prove under the law, at least based upon the evidence presented so far. Nothing prior to the shooting was any activity that would not be reasonable and prudent and indeed completely legal. There's no law saying that you have to close your garage door. There's no law saying that leaving your garage door open is somehow an irresistible invitation to Joe Blow on the street. If you put $10,000 in cash right inside the "threshold" of the garage in plain view, you might have a case, but that's not the case here. There's certainly no law against setting up surveillance of your own property nor is there any law against having motion sensors or other such alarms. What he said at the beauty parlor can readily be written off as barber shop bravado.

The simple fact is that there is precisely one person who could have prevented this from ever happening, and that's Diren Dede.






Back in about 1992, I was at my parents' house for the summer. At dawn one quiet Sunday morning, the phone rang. It was Citibank. They were asking about the location of my credit card, and then the lady on the other end of the line noted asked me if I knew a Nancy Wood at the same address. I explained that was my mother, and the lady said that she had MNPD on the other line, and they had recovered both of our credit cards from some kids who had been caught breaking into cars early that morning. I went outside and checked, and indeed my car (parked in the driveway) had been broken into, and the garage door was open. They had used my electric garage door opener to gain access to the garage. Yes, I was stupid to leave my wallet in the car: I had taken it out of the pocket of my shorts at the gas station to buy gas for the lawn mower and forgot to grab it back out of the center console when I got home. My mother kept her Citibank card in her car (parked in the garage) because she used that one specifically for buying gas and other car purchases: it was specifically for tracking her business expenses as a "secret shopper" for Castner-Knott, which still existed at the time (long-since taken over by Dillard's).

Well, I ponied up and went right down to the criminal justice center and started asking questions. I found the detective who had just been handed the case, as well as the patrol officers who had caught the kids. After probably 45 minutes of discussion between us all, they decided that they could re-arrest the kids (who were in the process of getting bailed out at that moment) for more charges of theft under $500 (one each for each of our cell phones), theft over $500 (one each for the credit cards, plus they snagged an expensive radar detector from Dad's car and a rather expensive scanner from my car), criminal trespass, and something along the lines of "wonton property destruction" for busting out my car window. They could not, however, charge them with burglary because the law in Tennessee at the time said that someone had to enter into the "improved area" of a home; since our garage was not heated or cooled, and didn't have, say, carpet or something like that, it was legally considered "unimproved." Since they didn't actually break open the garage door, but instead used the opener (even though they got it by breaking into my car; the law has since changed in this regard), they could only be charged with either "illegal entry" or "criminal trespass." Since criminal trespass is a higher crime, they charged that. So, I got the personal satisfaction of seeing their bond revoked about ten seconds after they posted it and getting cuffed again and taken right back to booking, but it was only for relatively minor charges. I did, however, at least get my wallet back right away.

I was frankly a bit incredulous that the law would be so narrow as to not consider illegal entry into a garage to be a burgle under the law, and asked the detective "What if I had caught them in there? What if I had woken up, heard a noise, and taken my gun into the garage?" His response, without batting an eye, was "justifiable homicide by virtue of self-defense." The law (at least at the time; it may have changed since then) viewed the garage as not a place in which a burglary can occur, but it did consider it a place where I would feel justifiably threatened as a resident of the property, seeing two strangers who didn't belong there, to utilize deadly force against them.

Tennessee's gun and self-defense laws of the early '90s were most definitely stricter than Montana's gun and self-defense laws of today. The law, rightly, defers a whole lot toward the homeowner who defends himself in his home, and for damn good reason. Unless there's some real smoking gun (pun intended) evidence, I strongly suspect that the DA will either decline to press charges, or else cut a deal for something very light (e.g. probation or 11-29 or something like that) to settle this.

The kid took a very stupid risk that he undeniably knew might be lethal, and he lost. The homeowner is a dumbass who needs to stop smoking pot all the time and learn when is the right time to shoot. The parents who are whining in Germany need to get used to the fact that their son was a serial criminal.

[Adam]

I don't think the issue is the open garage door...it's what Gramps said...the trap was set. If the homeowner had the door open for whatever reason, an intruder comes, and the homeowner is fearful for his life...self defense. In this case, however, the homeowner clearly wanted to shoot whoever walked through that door, not to defend himself, or even to defend his property, but for revenge. I believe intent is important.

I don't think that's a fact in evidence. I believe that is an assertion of the prosecution (actually, just the police at this point), but I don't think that's been determined to be fact by a long shot (no pun intended this time).

[phillygirl]

I don't think that's a fact in evidence. I believe that is an assertion of the prosecution (actually, just the police at this point), but I don't think that's been determined to be fact by a long shot (no pun intended this time).

Okay, you may be right. I haven't fully read everything yet.