Serious in Indiana: Cleaning lady shot to death after going to the wrong house
Authorities are considering whether to file charges against an Indiana homeowner who, they say, shot and killed a woman who worked as a house cleaner after she mistakenly went to the wrong address.
According to a police news release, officers found 32-year-old Maria Florinda Rios Perez dead shortly before 7 a.m. Wednesday on the porch of a home in Whitestown, an Indianapolis suburb of about 10. She was part of a cleanup crew that had gone to the wrong address.
Rios Perez's husband, Mauricio Velazquez, told WRTV in Indianapolis that he and his wife had been cleaning houses for seven months. Velazquez said he was standing with her at the door of the house 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. 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 unable to reach family members directly Friday.
Authorities have not publicly identified the shooter. Police turned over the findings of their investigation to Boone County District Attorney Kent Eastwood on Friday afternoon, but the prosecutor said the decision on whether to file charges will not be easy. He said the case directly touches on Indiana’s castle doctrine laws, which allow a person to use reasonable force, including deadly force, to stop what he reasonably believes is an unlawful entry into his residence. Thirty-one states have similar laws in place, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In similar cases in other countries, prosecutors have successfully prosecuted people who opened fire outside their homes, including a guilty plea from an 86-year-old man who shot Ralph Yarl after the black teenager mistakenly came to his door. In New York, a man was convicted of second-degree murder for shooting a woman inside a car that accidentally pulled up in his driveway.
Eastwood said he will have to carefully examine investigators' findings to understand what happened in the moments before the shooting. That includes reviewing "every second" of recorded witness interviews and doorbell footage, if police have it.
“You have to understand all the details in order to understand what happened and what is reasonable,” Eastwood said. “One of the hardest things in this world today is to agree on what is reasonable. As prosecutors, these are things that we have to deal with.”
