Posted on 06/12/2012 10:25:12 AM PDT by marktwain
-- Seville Nelson is still angry with the store clerk who shot and killed his cousin during a robbery last year but also understands why the man did what he did.
“Nobody can say he’s wrong for protecting himself,” Nelson said. “You wish it was different the whole way around.
“I’d rather see my cousin in jail for life than where he is now.”
The store clerk, Edmund Joubran, said it was the right decision -- even if the gun pointed at him turned out to be plastic.
“I felt like I didn’t know what the outcome was going to be. I guess you’re scared and I gave him a handful of money and when I went back for some more I decided I was going to pull (my gun),” said Joubran.
Joubran was working behind the counter at Jules Market on Flint's east side March 21, 2011, when he said two men came in and announced a hold up.
In a flash from Joubran's .38-caliber pistol, 19-year-old Don Mitts was dead as the other robber fled from the store.
“Nothing goes through you head,” Joubran said of firing the fatal shot. “Maybe because you don’t know what’s going to happen; I don’t think you really think about it.”
Despite having no available surveillance footage of the shooting, Flint police Sgt. Jeff Collins said the case was fairly straightforward.
“He was still clenching the money and the gun when he was on the floor,” Joubran said.
Authorities ruled that Joubran was justified using lethal force during the shooting but the slaying still upsets Mitts' mother.
Sitting in dining room of her Flint apartment with her now-fatherless grandson, Tyler, on her knee, Vanessia Mitts choked back tears as she talked about her son.
“He was like my best friend,” she said, a smile forming on her lips. “We loved to joke and play.”
Vanessia Mitts said her son began to mature after Tyler's birth. He went back to school and worked to try and join the Army. He did everything he could to try and provide for his son.
But she said he changed after a custody dispute over the boy.
“He was like dead from there on,” Vanessia Mitts said. “He just shut down.
“He’d lock himself in the room and cried all the time.”
Vanessia Mitts said she thinks her son went to that store that night to get money to help him get his son back.
The outcome of the investigation did little to console her and said she still had questions about that night.
According to Collins, the gun authorities recovered at the scene was a plastic toy gun, a revelation that was never shared with Joubran or Mitts' family until only recently.
“It’s black, it looks like a gun and it’s pointed toward you trembling,” Joubran said. “What do you do?”
Despite taking a man’s life, Joubran, who has traded the life of a store clerk for that of a sales person, said that he still believes he made the correct decision that night.
“I think everything in that situation went right,” Joubran said. “When you work 65-70 hours a week and the store’s barely making it and somebody wants to come in and take it …
“I know people are hurting, but that’s not the way to go.”
And for the now one-and-a-half-year-old Tyler, who was returned to Michigan the day after his father died, Vanessia Mitts said her grandson will grow up knowing the love his father had for him.
“He knows his daddy loves him.”
Yes, I'm sure that's it.
If the gun had been real, the clerk had no way to know if the perp would have killed him after getting the second handful of money, so there’d be no witnesses.
Sad...
Sounds like typical 12th generation rooosvelt welfare slavery. No way out for anyone. Girls just do what momma did and boys just go gangsta.
FWIW, the deceased did look like the Fist Gay President’s son.
Considering Flint, MI is considered the worst city in America, beyond even Detroit, Oakland and Memphis, I’d say they were right to shoot.
Shooting anyone pointing a gun at you is the right decision.
If he had decided to go to w-o-r-k everything would have been OK.
Unfortunate typo, but it does sort of work.
;-)
“worst city” is a little vague. Certainly not the most dangerous city.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2894405/posts
“He was still clenching the money and the gun when he was on the floor,”
But did he have skittles in his pocket?
Hint to developmentally disabled robbers, don’t bring a squirt gun to a gunfight.
Over and out...
Did they describe the shooter as a “white person of middle eastern descent” yet?
They have a way out. They choose not to take the higher road. In fact, they take a generous dump on the higher road daily in this country and are convinced is someone’s fault that they are not successful.
No sympathy for the decedant. Here in Missouri his accomplice would be charged with Murder 2nd Degree.
Liberals spent much of the 20th Century trying to undermine capital punishment, mostly because they just didn’t like it, because it made them feel bad.
But capital punishment, swift and sure, provided an element of fairness that we no longer have today. Accused of murder, rape or armed robbery, a person would stand before a judge and jury, and their peers would decide that they had committed a capital offense and should hang for it. 13 judges, as it were, any of which could have spared their life.
And it wasn’t just the hanging that was the deterrent, though it was what people assumed. It was the certainty of the trial, that judge and jury, and even the governor, who would in effect sentence them to death in the name of society.
“You mother still loves you, but you are a bad man and need hanging.”
If such a thing still existed, in a swift and sure form, resulting in a drop from gallows, would this man have still tried to armed rob a store?
He might have. Yet few armed robbers would consider that a clerk was armed. They might imagine themselves hanging, however.
In either case, liberals lose, and some of those that need killing get killed. The last armed robber legally executed was (not the actor) James Coburn, in 1964. Not executing them for robbery has not reduced the death rate of armed robbers one bit.
“He went back to school and worked to try and join the Army.
And he was turning his life around too.”
And I bet that he was an up and coming rapper as well.
The “it was only a plastic gun” defense is pretty weak considering that many guns are largely made of plastic these days.
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