Authorities are considering whether to charge an Indiana homeowner who they say shot and killed a woman working as a house cleaner after she mistakenly went to the wrong address.
Police officers found 32-year-old Maria Florinda Rios Perez dead just before 7 a.m. Wednesday on the front porch of the home in Whitestown, an Indianapolis suburb of about 10,000 people, according to a police news release. She was part of a cleaning crew that had gone to the wrong address, the release said.
Rios Perez’s husband, Mauricio Velazquez, told WRTV in Indianapolis that he and his wife had been cleaning homes for seven months. Velazquez said he was standing with her at the home’s front door on Wednesday morning but didn’t realize she had been shot until she fell into his arms, bleeding.
On a fundraising page, her brother described Rios Perez as a mother of four children. Police said Friday that she was from Indianapolis but the family plans to bury her in Guatemala, according to her obituary and her brother’s fundraising page. The Associated Press was not able to reach family members directly on Friday.
Authorities have not publicly identified the shooter. Police turned over the findings from their investigation to Boone County Prosecutor Kent Eastwood on Friday afternoon, but the prosecutor said the decision on whether to file charges won’t be easy.
The case brings Indiana’s castle doctrine laws squarely into play, he said. Those laws allow a person to use reasonable force, including deadly force, to stop what they reasonably believe is an unlawful entry into their dwelling. Thirty-one states have similar laws on the books, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In similar cases elsewhere, prosecutors have successfully brought charges against people who opened fire outside their homes, including a guilty plea by an 86-year-old man who shot Ralph Yarl after the Black teenager came to his door by mistake. In New York, a man was convicted of second-degree murder for fatally shooting a woman inside a car who came down his driveway by mistake.
Eastwood said he will have to pore over investigators’ findings to understand what happened in the moments leading up to the shooting. That means reviewing “every second” of witnesses’ taped interviews and doorbell footage if police bring him any, he said.
“You need to understand all the details so you can understand what happened and what is reasonable,” Eastwood said. “One of the hardest things today in this world is to agree on what’s reasonable. As a prosecutor, those are things we have to grapple with.”
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