Last Thursday, on January 5, 2023, 30-year-old career violent criminal Eric Eugene Washington made the unwise decision to commit a late-night armed robbery of a Houston taqueria, threatening customers and workers with an apparent pistol (later discovered to be a fake gun).
Washington would not survive the experience. One of the taqueria’s customers was in possession of an actual pistol and would use that weapon to fire nine rounds at Washington, with fatal results.
Although the shooter initially fled the scene, along with all the other customers, he has now reportedly retained legal counsel and is cooperating with the authorities investigating this event. It is reported that the case will be presented to a grand jury for consideration. The shooter has not been arrested, and as a result the authorities are allowing him to remain anonymous.
The question now, of course, is whether the shooter’s use of deadly defensive force to stop Washington’s armed robbery was justified on the legal merits.
The answer? Yes, maybe, and almost certainly not.
[Proper training for carry permit holders includes the valuable legal analysis provided here by Andrew Branca. Don’t TL;DR this one, but read it in full. If you use lethal force in self-defense, you will have to justify *every shot* at some point or find yourself in the dock, even with “stand your ground” statutes on the books as is the case in Texas.
I’d guess that prosecutors won’t find a jury to convict this guy, but they may well get an indictment from the grand jury over that last shot to the head. If this person had a better sense of the law, he might have refrained from taking it, and saved himself a lot of cost, time, and potentially a prison sentence. — Ed]
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