Swift Frontier Justice: Texas Man Finds Stolen Truck, Kills Thief In Shootout

One alleged truck thief is useless, one other wounded in a Texas shootout that additionally left the car’s proprietor wounded. The useless man’s brother audaciously claims “the victim was my brother” — a sentiment that can discover few subscribers within the Lone Star State.  

The motion began early Thursday afternoon on the South Park Mall on the southwest aspect of San Antonio. A forty five-year-old man exited the mall alongside together with his feminine passenger, solely to search out his Ford truck was lacking. Looking round, they noticed the truck in a close-by lot on the similar mall — with the obvious thieves sitting in it. 

The proprietor approached his truck and — displaying a pistol — ordered the 34-year-old male driver and the thief’s 25-year-old feminine passenger to step outdoors and sit on the pavement. Two minutes after police had been known as, the male suspect drew a pistol from his waistband and shot the truck’s proprietor. 

The proprietor returned fireplace, hitting and killing the shooter and critically wounding the shooter’s companion. Clarifying the account at a press conference held on the mall, San Antonio police chief William McManus stated, “The bad guy is the one dead, yes. The driver of the stolen vehicle is deceased, shot by the owner of the stolen vehicle.”

When questioned concerning the propriety of the truck proprietor’s actions, McManus was fast to render a verdict. “Certainly a case of self-defense is what we have. Look, he was trying to recover his property,” McManus stated. “I guess it would depend on who you asked if he did the right thing or not.”

“We would prefer that they call the police before taking that into your own hands,” McManus stated. “But he (the truck’s owner) did what he felt he needed to do and we have one dead suspect and we have a critically wounded passenger who was with the suspect and we have a wounded owner of the vehicle.”

Speaking to KENS 5 on the scene, the useless man’s brother, Jose Garcia, stated the truck proprietor was incorrect:

“The victim was my brother and there are two sides to every story. Whether my brother was wrong or right, he had a gun pointed at him. I guess he took it upon himself to defend himself.

The guy who shot him is a vigilante, not a hero. A vehicle is not worth taking someone’s life, I don’t care what kind of car it is. You don’t take the law into your own hands. Now my mom, my family, we all have to suffer and just deal with it.”

Texas affords residents extra latitude than most relating to utilizing pressure to get better stolen property.  “Potentially, under Texas law, he may have been acting within what the law says he got to do,” Alexandra Klein, an assistant legislation professor at San Antonio’s St. Mary’s University instructed NBC. 

Here’s to armed self-defense and legal guidelines that allow the protection of property.