Posted on 11/27/2012 10:23:53 PM PST by Arthurio
A Brevard County man remained in jail late Tuesday, accused of shooting a teenager dead in an argument over loud music.
Michael David Dunn, 45, and his girlfriend were in Jacksonville Friday for Dunn's son's wedding when they stopped at a convenience store, Jacksonville sheriff's Lt. Rob Schoonover said.
Jordan Russell Davis, 17, and several other teenagers were sitting in a sport utility vehicle in the parking lot when Dunn pulled up next to them in a car and asked them to turn down their music, Schoonover said.
Jordan and Dunn exchanged words, and Dunn pulled a gun and shot eight or nine times, striking Jordan twice, Schoonover said. Jordan was sitting in the back seat. No one else was hurt.
Dunn's attorney Monday said her client acted responsibly and in self-defense. She did not elaborate.
(Excerpt) Read more at articles.orlandosentinel.com ...
Looks like Dunn’s lawyer is already badmouthing Zimmerman in the media. This Dunn guy is probably going to do 25 to life. Nice wedding day memory for his son.
I wonder if verbal threats constitute a reason for lethal force?
I’m sure the conversation didnt’ go like this:
Dunn: Please turn down your stereo.
Russel: No sir!
Cops are the only ones alowed to shoot menacing unarmed people and restrained dogs.
We are only getting the side put out by Jordan’s friends. Dunn says he saw a gun in the SUV, and the SUV fled the scene after he shot.
If this is true, Dunn did not have any certainty whether he hit anyone or not. If a gun had been pulled on him, the other people in the SUV had plenty of time to dispose of it before the police searched the car.
Here is a link to a Gannet story where Dunn’s girlfreind says that the SUV was gone from the convenience store when she came back outside.
http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20121126/NEWS01/311250063/Brevard-resident-arrested
What was left out, was that Dunn claims that he was threatened with a gun, and that the SUV with the people who threatened him fled the scene after he shot. If this is so he could not be certain anyone was even hit, there was no "scene" left for him to show to police, and there was plenty of time and opportunity for Jordan's friends to sanitize the SUV and concoct a story that there never was any threat made against Dunn.
I hope that the police have separated all the people who were in the SUV with Jordan, and got statements under oath from all of them. If a story was concocted in order to cove for criminal actions, you can usually determine it this way. Inconsistancies will creep in. Most groups of people cannot agree to enough details to hold a cover story together.
I wonder how much later they reported the shooting. Did they drive Jordan directly to the hospital? That is what you would ordinarily expect.
The police tend to take the first people reporting as the “victim”. Dunn had a lot to consider. There was no body or vehicle to even show that there was a shooting. If he involves the police, he is likely to miss his son's wedding. He does not even know if anyone has been hit.
He should have reported it, to get his side on the record, even if it made him late for the wedding, because criminals often make up stories that put them in the best possible light.
Jordan's friends in the SUV had lots of time to consider their story, and plenty of motive to come up with a good one and to sanitize the scene to their advantage.
They had the whole Trayvon Martin episode to act as an example of what they should concoct.
Well, yeah. It's exactly the same narrative. Forget the pesky details. Mean old white man with scowl shoots doe eyed honor student. Racism!
This incident, however, is not in any way similar to the Trayvon/Zimmerman shooting. The shooter fired 8-9 times into an occupied vehicle, claiming that he did so because he felt threatened. Well, he needs to prove that he had a sufficient reason to feel threatened, because so far it looks like there was an argument (with expletives and threats most probably) and things got out of hand, and his response was to settle a verbal argument with gunfire. All that is coming out so far is his lawyer is claiming it was 'self defense' (and per the several articles I've read saying nothing more, with one saying there were negative comments about the Zimmerman case). Was there a gun in the other car? There could have been an RPG-7 with a miniaturized thermobaric warhead, but without evidence of its presence it was never there.
As it stands, even without the media getting involved, this man shot at a highschool kid because of an argument over loud music. Even without any extraneous 'acceleration' that is quite damming. Throw in the media coming in on the tailends of the Trayvon/Zimmerman case, with the same prosecutor, and this man is finished.
Add to this that he left the scene, which would make sense if he was leaving (as he claims ...or was it some FReeper here) to avoid the chance that the people in the car were 'thugs' and more thugs would be coming. That would have made sense ...had he left to go straight to a police station and report what happened. However, that's not what he did, was it? He leaves and goes to a motel. His number is jotted down by witnesses. Witnesses who saw a shooting where the shooter appears to have fled the scene (and I use 'appears' loosely since it does seem that he actually fled the scene). And he only turns himself up when the story hits the evening news, with a chance that witness descriptions of the shooter/vehicle came up. Also not good.
The only way this guy is avoiding prison time is if CCTV shows the occupants of the other vehicle brandishing a weapon. Somehow I doubt such evidence will come up, and I also doubt it happened that way. This was probably a 'nice person' who was having a bad day and events just pushed him over the edge, and he responded in a manner that I believe he wishes he didn't. Unfortunately in the eyes of the law he killed someone over what appears to be verbal disagreement due to loud music.
Completely dissimilar to the Trayvon/Zimmerman case, and to be honest I would say that prosecutors pray for such cases because they are open and shut for the most part. Unless some CCTV evidence comes out this man will be spending a lot of time warming up to Bubba and Tyrone.
Bottom line: Without evidence to the contrary, what you have here is a person who shot at a car based on a verbal argument. This is different from the Zimmerman case, and different from the other case of the black lady who shot a white man that was attacking her car. In both of those cases a good lawyer can mount an effective defense. In this case? I hope he is a praying man, because only a veritable miracle would have a chance of saving him. This is a prosecutor's dream case.
I left off the /s-a so actually it ws pretty smart
Further reports state that the police found no weapon in the car or near the scene, and that all the passengers in the SUV remained on the scene to make reports.
As it stands, there is zero evidence that anyone in that car was armed.
As you say, the shooter fled the scene and did not contact the police until after the incident was being reported on the news.
The shooter has been described as a "gun collector" but there is no report I've yet seen saying he had a CCW.
More details about the dead teenager are emerging - unlike Trayvon Martin he was apparently a student in good standing at a magnet high school (we'll see if this claim changes) and he was reportedly gainfully employed in an after-school job at a supermarket.
It's unclear if the shooter was coming from or going to a wedding when the incident occurred, but if he was coming from the wedding, there will be testimony about how much he was drinking.
Barring any shocking new facts, this guy is done - and if he was a CCW holder, he may bring Floridians' 2A rights with him.
My impression is that this is the kind of thing you only see in the movies or among criminal perps. This being a regular guy, I have my doubts. I'm inclined to think that he saw a sudden movement inside the SUV suggesting that a weapon was being readied for use, whereupon he reached for his holstered gun and opened fire. While I think it was a bad idea for him to talk to a bunch of black teenagers who were strangers to him about the noise they were making, simply because of the risk (1) that they were criminals and (2) of escalation, it's not a crime to act in self-defense. Nonetheless, I think there's a chance he may go down for negligent homicide.
He accosted them about their earsplitting sound system.
It wasn’t self-defense. It was a public service.
No argument from me ZF, but let me ask you something. Were you his legal representative, how would you be able to prove self defense? Sure, he may have seen a sudden movement that made him assume incorrectly, but is that a cogent defense? With the lack of a weapon, and his exit from the scene without reporting the incident to the authorities, I really wouldn’t want to be him. I honestly do not see any way he’d get away with this, and that is without the media attention this case is getting. This is a man in serious need of Alladin’s genie, and even then it may not be sufficient.
The bigger problem here is that Dunn used a pistol when that situation most properly called for the deployment of a fragmentation device.
What did you survive? Some guy addressing you from his car?
Get real. This isn't a cheesy 1970s made for TV movie.
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