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Official deters burglar with gun
Josey1
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Official deters burglar with gun
By Lisa J. Huriash
Staff Writer
Posted September 11 2002
POMPANO BEACH ? City Commissioner Lamar Fisher, who grabbed his handgun after being jolted out of bed by the sound of glass smashing, held a burglar at bay -- even firing a shot that hit his living room wall -- until sheriff's deputies answered his wife's frantic calls.
Fisher, 41, is the second city leader in little more than a week to be a crime victim within his own voting district. On Sept. 1, Commissioner Ed Phillips was standing outside a fraternity house with three friends talking politics when two teens approached with a gun. The teens, wearing ski masks, forced the four men to remove their pants, and made off with less than $100 and a handful of credit cards.
Fisher said his wife and two children were asleep in his two-story Garden Isles house on the 200 block of Southeast Fifth Terrace about 3 a.m. Monday when a neighbor tried to break in.
"It's the most frightening thing I've ever been through," Fisher said Tuesday, adding that his children are still "extremely affected" by the incident. "I just thank God we are safe and everybody is OK," he said. Fisher, who has a concealed weapons permit, declined to comment further.
"I didn't want to make this into a public issue," he said.
The burglar turned out to be John Francis Laughlin -- who lives across the street, Broward sheriff's officials said. Laughlin was released from jail at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday on $5,000 bond. He is charged with burglary.
According to a Sheriff's Office report, Fisher walked downstairs after hearing the glass break and saw Laughlin, 47, in his underwear with both hands on the living room window frame and one foot on the ledge trying to pull himself inside. Fisher tried to push Laughlin out the window.
"Despite his actions, the defendant kept attempting to come in through the window," the report reads. "Sometime during the struggle, the victim fired off one round from his handgun." When police arrived, they heard "voices screaming and crying for help from inside."
It took three deputies to arrest Laughlin. Records show Laughlin was arrested in 1987 and 1988 on drug-related charges.
In the Phillips robbery case, authorities arrested Rodney Mitchell, 17, of Dania Beach, who police say dropped his house key at the crime scene. Mitchell, who detectives say forced the men to strip, will be charged as an adult and faces a minimum of 15 years in prison on each of four counts. Authorities are still looking for Mitchell's accomplice, a gunman, alleged to be Joseph Edison, 19.
Phillips, 51, said the experience of being forced to find his way home in his underwear has energized him to fight crime.
Phillips said he hopes the recent spate of crime against city leaders isn't a trend. "You've got to be kidding," Phillips said when he heard about Fisher's experience. "This highlights we can't treat crime as business as usual. We will not go quietly into the night. We will not sit back."
Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4557.
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http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/palmbeach/search/sfl-pclamar11sep11.story
Copyright c 2002, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
By Lisa J. Huriash
Staff Writer
Posted September 11 2002
POMPANO BEACH ? City Commissioner Lamar Fisher, who grabbed his handgun after being jolted out of bed by the sound of glass smashing, held a burglar at bay -- even firing a shot that hit his living room wall -- until sheriff's deputies answered his wife's frantic calls.
Fisher, 41, is the second city leader in little more than a week to be a crime victim within his own voting district. On Sept. 1, Commissioner Ed Phillips was standing outside a fraternity house with three friends talking politics when two teens approached with a gun. The teens, wearing ski masks, forced the four men to remove their pants, and made off with less than $100 and a handful of credit cards.
Fisher said his wife and two children were asleep in his two-story Garden Isles house on the 200 block of Southeast Fifth Terrace about 3 a.m. Monday when a neighbor tried to break in.
"It's the most frightening thing I've ever been through," Fisher said Tuesday, adding that his children are still "extremely affected" by the incident. "I just thank God we are safe and everybody is OK," he said. Fisher, who has a concealed weapons permit, declined to comment further.
"I didn't want to make this into a public issue," he said.
The burglar turned out to be John Francis Laughlin -- who lives across the street, Broward sheriff's officials said. Laughlin was released from jail at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday on $5,000 bond. He is charged with burglary.
According to a Sheriff's Office report, Fisher walked downstairs after hearing the glass break and saw Laughlin, 47, in his underwear with both hands on the living room window frame and one foot on the ledge trying to pull himself inside. Fisher tried to push Laughlin out the window.
"Despite his actions, the defendant kept attempting to come in through the window," the report reads. "Sometime during the struggle, the victim fired off one round from his handgun." When police arrived, they heard "voices screaming and crying for help from inside."
It took three deputies to arrest Laughlin. Records show Laughlin was arrested in 1987 and 1988 on drug-related charges.
In the Phillips robbery case, authorities arrested Rodney Mitchell, 17, of Dania Beach, who police say dropped his house key at the crime scene. Mitchell, who detectives say forced the men to strip, will be charged as an adult and faces a minimum of 15 years in prison on each of four counts. Authorities are still looking for Mitchell's accomplice, a gunman, alleged to be Joseph Edison, 19.
Phillips, 51, said the experience of being forced to find his way home in his underwear has energized him to fight crime.
Phillips said he hopes the recent spate of crime against city leaders isn't a trend. "You've got to be kidding," Phillips said when he heard about Fisher's experience. "This highlights we can't treat crime as business as usual. We will not go quietly into the night. We will not sit back."
Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4557.
Email story
Print story
MORE HEADLINES
FBI calls search of Boca anthrax building successful
Atlantic Avenue Bridge closures suspended for 'Bad Boys 2' filming
Privacy rights in nursing homes
Farewell: Three rules to live by
Businessman, teacher gear up for November
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/palmbeach/search/sfl-pclamar11sep11.story
Copyright c 2002, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Comments
By Andrew Weinman , Staff writer 09/11/2002
Not everything is as quiet in Lewisville as some people may believe. Carnation Drive resident Robert Baxter knows this for a fact.
Baxter caught two suspects attempting to break into his home at about 5 p.m. Friday, according to Lewisville Police Department information officer Richard Douglass. They escaped after a brief altercation with Baxter, in which he shot the front tire of their vehicle.
Two suspects were later arrested. Long Scott, 19, of Lewisville, and Tiffany McGee, 21, of Highland Village are being held in connection with the robbery.
Baxter, however, said there is a lot more to the story.
The trouble, he said, started a few hours earlier as left the house with his wife, Stephanie, and his 3-year-old daughter, Emily, to prepare for his wife's birthday party. As they were leaving the house through a nearby alley, they had a fender bender with a large red van in which a young couple was riding.
"No real damage was done, but [the man] was upset with me," Baxter said. "But he left real quick, and [my family and I] thought, 'Well, that was weird.' We didn't think much of it at the time. We went to get my kids, and we were gone maybe 10 minutes at the most."
When they returned, Baxter and his family saw the same red van sitting outside of their home with a female inside of it. Baxter went up to the van to see if the couple had returned for any insurance information. She told him her friend had gone around into the backyard to look for him.
"She was very nervous," Baxter said. "I remember thinking, 'Well, you saw us leave, you know we weren't here.' So I went to the back of house... and saw the whole [sliding glass door] was smashed out and broken, so I knew the guy was in the house."
At that point, Baxter reportedly went inside the house brandishing a firearm, yelling for the suspect to get out. The suspect apparently ran for the bedroom, upon which point Baxter began chasing him around the house.
"He must've run back out toward out his van to try and get away, because I heard the van start up," Baxter said. "He was peeling out, and my wife, who was 5 months pregnant, and my 3-year-old daughter, they didn't know what was going on. So they were just sitting there, trying to figure out what was going on, right behind this guy in the van."
According to Baxter, once the man in the van saw that Baxter had gone outside, he began to floor the van in reverse.
"He looked at me with a smirk on his face and floored it right behind him," Baxter recalled. "I yelled 'stop, stop,' but he didn't. I thought that he was going to kill my wife, so I blew out the front tire of his van to try to keep it from moving. At that point, he did start going the other way, and apparently he decided that he needed to take me out and tried to run me over. I dove out of the way and took out the passenger-side front tire [by shooting at it]. But he kept going, and drove right through the fence.
"[The man] took out four solid fence posts and he was laughing like crazy. He and the girl started tossing things from the house into the alley. Shortly after that, the police came by and said they'd caught one of the suspects and that were looking for the other one."
"That's how my wife's birthday went Friday night," added Baxter.
Baxter is understandably upset with the whole situation.
"[We live in] a great neighborhood, but in the past year, there've been enormous amounts of petty crime, graffiti and little things being stolen," he said. "It's things like that are really getting old. The police do an excellent job -- the minute I was on the phone, they were here in maybe two minutes, and did a really excellent job and were very professional about getting the information and recovering what they could of our stuff.
"But the police can't be at your front doorstep seven days a week, and most of the time people are having to pick up the pieces just after it happened. I'm still not sleeping good, and my wife isn't either."
Baxter, who is licensed to carry a small concealed handgun, says that he is not a violent man, but that the number of problems in his area is almost intolerable. He also urges his neighbors to keep a closer eye on their surroundings in these difficult times.
"I am licensed to carry a handgun, but I believe that it should never be used," Baxter stated. "I am dead set against shooting somebody... but enough's enough. People need to take things in heart and realize you have to pay attention to things that happen. If you see something that doesn't look right, let somebody know."
Contact staff writer Andrew Weinman at 972-538-2117, or at weinmana@dfwcn.com.
cLewisville Leader 2002
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=5331524&BRD=1424&PAG=461&dept_id=186226&rfi=6
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
09/11/02
Associated Press
Columbus
- A man has been sentenced to prison in the shooting death of another man even though he was not armed and did not encourage the shooter.
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Prosecutors said Johnnie Booker was responsible for the death of Robert Wilson Jr. because both were committing a robbery at the time.
"It was foreseeable somebody could get killed," said Assistant Franklin County Prosecutor Michael Jakubow.
Wilson, 29, was shot in self-defense by a resident during a robbery at an apartment last year, prosecutors said. Booker, 31, of Columbus, was charged with murder.
Booker pleaded guilty Monday to involuntary manslaughter and aggravated burglary. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Jakubow said Wilson forced his way into the apartment at gunpoint in June 2001.
http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_standard.xsl?/base/news/103173685411770.xml
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878