Theodore Wafer Charged With Murder In Shooting Death Of Renisha McBride

[Mr Uncle Leroy]

Theodore Wafer Charged With Murder In Shooting Death Of Renisha McBride
A man was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and a related gun charge in the death of 19-year-old Renisha McBride, Michigan's Wayne County Prosecutor's Office said Friday.

Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced the charges against Theodore Paul Wafer, 54, also known as Ted, who allegedly shot the young woman in the face on his porch in Dearborn Heights, Mich. in the early hours of Nov. 2.

"We obviously do not feel that the evidence in this case reveals that the defendant acted in lawful self defense," Worthy said.

Wafer's attorney, Cheryl Carpenter, did not immediately return a request for comment.

"Under Michigan law, there is no duty to retreat in your own home, however,someone who claims self defense must honestly and reasonably believe that he is in imminent danger of either losing his life or suffering great bodily harm, and that the use of deadly force is necessary to prevent that harm," Worthy added in a statement. "This 'reasonable belief' is not measured subjectively, by the standards of the individual in question, but objectively, by the standards of a reasonable person."

Several hours before the shooting, McBride reportedly crashed her car several blocks away in Detroit. Detroit Police said they received a call just before 1 a.m. reporting a female driver had hit a parked car and then left the scene on foot. Worthy said she appeared disoriented and bloody.

Regarding the call as a lower priority, officers were not immediately sent to the scene of the accident. A little later, they received a call in which another individual said the driver had returned to the accident and appeared to be intoxicated or injured. By the time cops arrived at 1:40 a.m., 17 minutes after the second call, no one was there.

The Detroit News obtained a recording of the Dearborn Heights dispatcher who took the call around 4:45 a.m. from the homeowner saying he had just shot a woman on his porch. Listen to the audio, edited to remove silences and unrelated communications:


An official explanation of McBride's activities between the accident and her death has not been given, though her family has said they believe her phone was dead and she went to the man's house looking for help. Carpenter previously told The Huffington Post her client was awoken that night by noises and thought someone was trying to get into his home. She also said she believed when the evidence came to light, it would show her client's actions were justified.

According to Worthy, McBride knocked on the locked front screen door of the home. There were no signs of forced entry, and she reportedly was unarmed.

The Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled McBride's death a homicide. The autopsy showed that she was shot in the face, and not at close range. A toxicology report released Thursday showed that she had a blood alcohol content of almost .22, more than double the legal limit for driving. She tested positive for marijuana, though the report recommended a second test to confirm.

The attorney for her family, Gerald Thurswell, told the Associated Press the reportisn't relevant to her shooting.

Wafer is expected to be arraigned Friday afternoon. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison for the second-degree murder charge. Manslaughter carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison. The additional felony firearm charge carries an additional mandatory penalty of two years; Michigan law imposes the two-year sentence when a person is in possession of a firearm while committing or attempting to commit a felony.

Third Judicial Circuit Court of Michigan non-criminal records accessed online show Wafer was in court in 1995 after filing a complaint against a woman. It appears he was seeking a restraining order.

Prominent civil-rights activists and others have called for justice for McBride and have criticized what they've seen as a too-slow response to the shooting of a black woman in a predominantly white suburb.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said, "We are in prayer for the family of Renisha McBride, but we are also urgently calling for justice for the loss of this daughter, sister, and friend."

McBride’s death comes on the heels of a number of other high-profile shooting deaths of young black Americans, including Jonathan Ferrell in North Carolina in September, Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Fla., last November, and that of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla. in February 2012, which sparked a national conversation around gun control, race and self-defense laws.

McBride's family initially said they believe she was racially profiled by her killer, though their attorney later said he doesn't believe race played a role in her death. McBride had recently gotten at job at Ford after graduating from Southfield High School in 2012, where she was a cheerleader. At her funeral, her great aunt described her as an outgoing person who liked to spend time with family and friends, according to the Detroit Free Press.

"I am Renisha McBride and my life matters," reads a poster in support of the victim.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/15/theodore-wafer-charged-renisha-mcbride_n_4273903.html

 

[PewPew]

This should have happened the same week, but better late than never

 

[jackswstd]

Hope it sticks but you never know.

 

[Scientific Playa]

Prosecutor in Racially Charged Shooting Case Near Detroit Is No Stranger to Spotlight

Paul Sancya/Associated Press
Kym L. Worthy, center, Wayne County’s top prosecutor, on Friday announced second-degree murder charges in the shooting of a 19-year-old woman by a suburban Detroit homeowner.

By MONICA DAVEY
Published: November 18, 2013


DETROIT — For two weeks, the pressure on the prosecutor’s office here steadily grew.
Would a white homeowner in a mostly white suburb be charged with a crime in the shotgun slaying of a 19-year-old black woman from Detroit who came to his door in the middle of the night?

While civil rights activists compared the shooting to other racially tinged cases around the nation, most notably the death of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Wayne County’s top prosecutor was largely silent, saying only that she would announce a decision when her investigation was done. On Friday, speaking matter-of-factly in her packed offices in Detroit, the prosecutor, Kym L. Worthy, announced that she would seek a charge of second-degree murder.

Despite the intense focus on the case and the simmering racial concerns, Ms. Worthy said her approach to cases always remained the same.

“No matter what kind of pressure you receive to not charge a case or to charge it, you don’t go by that,” Ms. Worthy said on Monday in an interview here in her offices. “If the facts and evidence are leading you, then you can’t go wrong. If you are afraid to make those decisions, then you need not have this job. If you are afraid you will lose friends or lose influence or lose whatever — lose traction — then you don’t need to have this job, because you’ll make decisions based on the wrong things.”

Ms. Worthy, who nearly a decade ago became the first African-American and the first woman to hold the top prosecuting job in Wayne County, is widely viewed here as meticulous, blunt and unshakable, sometimes to a fault, her critics say, in her opinions.

Over the years, she has taken on county leaders, who she says have failed to fund her office sufficiently; uninvolved parents who refuse to take part in any conferences with teachers over their troubled children, and who Ms. Worthy once suggested should face up to three days in jail; and Kwame Kilpatrick, whom she charged with perjury, misconduct in office and other crimes while he was the mayor of Detroit, to the dismay of his allies.

“If she puts the hammer down on you, there’s that old saying, ‘You can run, but you can’t hide,’ ” said Arnold Reed, a lawyer who at one point represented Mr. Kilpatrick, who was also later convicted of federal crimes. “She’s relentless.”

Ms. Worthy, who is 55 and a single mother to three adopted daughters, served as an assistant prosecutor and a judge before becoming the top prosecutor in 2004 for Wayne County, which includes Detroit and is the state’s most populous county.

In recent years, she has drawn attention for her efforts to get more than 11,000 forgotten rape kits — containing forensic evidence from years-old rapes in Detroit — processed and cataloged, and the cold cases prosecuted. In 2009, the kits were discovered inside a Detroit evidence facility, and the effort since has proved costly and painstaking.

In a way, there is a personal tie. As a first-year law student at the University of Notre Dame, Ms. Worthy was a victim of a sexual assault, she said, a crime she did not report to the police at the time out of fear that it would derail her life.

“That experience made me a better prosecutor,” she said. “I knew what it was like to be a victim of crime.”

She has dealt with racially charged cases before. In the early 1990s, as an assistant prosecutor, Ms. Worthy prosecuted two white Detroit officers accused of beating to death a black motorist, Malice Green. Police officers, Ms. Worthy said, were split over their views of the case, and some — one group of officers who believed the prosecution was wrong — stopped speaking to her, she said.

The case against Mr. Kilpatrick, the former mayor, created tension in part because a black mayor was being targeted in a mostly black city. Some closest to Mr. Kilpatrick firmly believed that Ms. Worthy was wrong to pursue him in 2008, and in a 2011 memoir, Mr. Kilpatrick referred to Ms. Worthy as a “devil” with “dastardly ways.”

“There was a lot of pressure that was attempted to be applied,” Ms. Worthy said, who added later that she was not swayed by calls and even threats. “Quite frankly, I don’t really care what people say.”

Ultimately, Mr. Kilpatrick pleaded guilty to several felonies, and was later charged in federal court with additional crimes. He was sentenced to 28 years for them.

Some here view Ms. Worthy, a Democrat, as a potential candidate for higher office, perhaps Michigan attorney general. She has largely been unchallenged in her races for prosecutor. Ms. Worthy sidesteps such questions about the future, saying only that she has ruled nothing out, aside from mayor of Detroit. (“Never ever ever,” she said of that.)

In the shotgun death two weeks ago, Renisha Marie McBride was killed after she knocked on the door of a suburban house in the early morning hours of Nov. 2, the authorities say, and civil rights leaders have said they believe her race played a role. Ms. McBride had been in a car accident not long before and was intoxicated, the authorities say, and a lawyer for the homeowner, Theodore Wafer, has suggested that Mr. Wafer believed she was trying to break in.

Ms. Worthy has said that race had no bearing on her decision to charge the homeowner, and that she had no idea whether it would prove to have had a role in the case itself, adding curtly, “I’m not clairvoyant.”

Beyond a single case, though, Ms. Worthy said race relations, broadly, seemed to her more troubled than ever. “The racial tension in this country and the racial divide in this country has always been very, very high, but I think at some points it’s been more covert than others. I think when the president was elected it became much more overt and much more extreme on the outside,” she said, pausing before adding: “I don’t know what’s going to change it. I wish I did.”