WASHINGTON—No charges will be filed against a teen mother in Oklahoma who rang 911 on New Year’s Eve and asked if it might be OK for her to gun down an intruder at her mobile home, prosecutors said Thursday.
Sarah McKinley, 18, shot and killed Justin Martin, 24, with a 12-gauge shotgun after calling police and asking in a near-whisper: “I’ve got two guns in my hand. Is it OK to shoot him if he comes through the door?”
“Well, you have to do whatever you can do to protect yourself,” Grady County sheriff’s dispatcher Diane Graham replied. “I can’t tell you that you can do that, but you have to do what you have to do to protect your baby.”
Graham then heard a gunshot over the telephone line.
Police found Martin’s body, knife in hand, slumped over McKinley’s sofa, and determined the mother of a three-month-old baby — whose cancer-stricken husband died on Christmas Day — had acted in self-defense.
“Our initial review of the case doesn’t indicate she violated the law in any way,” assistant district attorney James Walters told the Oklahoman newspaper. “He should have thought about it before he went into someone’s home.”
Martin’s suspected accomplice Dustin Stewart, 29, who surrendered to police, was to appear in court Thursday.
According to the latest FBI data, firearms were used in 215 cases of “justifiable homicide” in 2009 in the United States, where every year guns figure in around 30,000 deaths ranging from murder to suicide and accidents.