Posted on 01/10/2008 10:15:47 AM PST by jaydubya2
HAMMOND | A Hessville woman will not be charged in the shooting death of a man accused of breaking into her home in November and stalking her.
(Listen to the 911 call)
Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter said on Wednesday he was turning down any charges against the woman in the death of Ryan Lee Bergner, 41, considering her actions to be in self-defense and defense of property.
The Nov. 12 shooting of Bergner as he cornered the 51-year-old woman in an upstairs bedroom closet capped a month of escalating terror -- chronicled in a series of police reports filed by the woman -- which included break-ins, vandalism and assaults in her workplace.
They had briefly dated over the summer, but Bergner couldn't accept that she didn't want to be his girlfriend, and wouldn't take "no" for an answer, the woman said.
That fatal Monday night, she was watching television at 10:30 p.m. when she heard a window breaking, and called 911.
An audio recording of her conversation with the emergency dispatcher, from the initial break-in to her escape from the dying Bergner six minutes later, was released by Hammond police on Wednesday.
"I'm so scared," the woman said to the 911 operator, who told her to lock herself in a bedroom until police arrived.
Bergner had already broken into her house two days earlier, she reported to police, destroying a clock-radio and stealing several of her undergarments.
"I heard him turn a light on, a hallway light," she told the dispatcher as she hid in a closet, armed with a pistol a friend had given her for protection.
"What are you doing?" she can be heard asking over the sound of her bedroom door being kicked in. "Stop it! Please stop it! Just stop it!"
Gunshots can clearly be heard on the recording. She later said Bergner was on top of her in the closet, his hands around her throat, choking her.
"What are you trying to do, kill me?" the mortally wounded Bergner asked.
"Are you trying to kill me?"
Police found her in her front yard when they arrived moments later, and found Bergner, wearing black leather gloves and a brown leather jacket, lying partially in the bedroom closet with three bullet wounds to his abdomen, a 9 mm pistol on the bed nearby.
"That tape is absolutely chilling," said Hammond Police Chief Brian Miller, who worked for years as a detective with the department's sex crimes division.
Miller said he is regularly asked to speak at meetings of women's organizations and support groups for victims of domestic violence, and in the future will be taking the recording along with him as an example of what can happen.
"I didn't want it to turn out like this," the woman told The Times the day after the shooting, though she declined to comment for the record on Wednesday's decision by the prosecutor's office.
Sounds like a real winner.
Understandable if she didn’t want it to turn out like that, but you have to do what you have to do to stay alive.
Happened in November.
What took them so long??
Thank goodness she knew how to run the pistol. (I know, I know, if it had been a .45 she would have only had to fire once)
Sounds like a no brainer to me.
sorta
Did he ask his last question after the first, second, or third bullet hit him?
"No, try not. Do or not do ... there is no try" Yoda
“What are you trying to do, kill me?” the mortally wounded Bergner asked.
I guess her rejections didn’t sink in.
But the bullets did.
By the time the police got there, the dead body would have been hers - had she not had the gun.
What is the saying: “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.”
We have the right of self-defense = and not to feel bad for taking a life rather than dying...she did not kill this man so much as he killed himself by his actions...This is a better outcome than her having to go through a year of more of trial - with him, no doubt, out on bail...and even if convicted, the specter of his getting out always hanging over her life. This way, it is over with. He is the cause of his death.
I would happily replace her ammo!
Also, he was still alive after three shots to the abdomen.
Sounds like she needs a larger caliber.
Oh, and the family of the dead scumbag insist that he was such a sweet man. Why, they simply can't believe he would do such a thing.
Don't leave the gun with the attacker - he might get up again!
“What are you trying to do, kill me?” the mortally wounded Bergner asked.
Like...duh!
That had to be the dumbest question of his life.....and the last one to boot.
Ping
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