Texas Man Shoots Teen on Porch/Update/Plot Thickens

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"It doesn't change a thing," Sgt. Brandon Negri of the Department of Public Safety said of the toxicology results. "She was not doing anything wrong in terms of her driving."
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On a side note, this is highly problematic. Do you know how many people get DUIs driving perfectly fine, but yet their only crime is being intoxicated? :scrutiny:

I'm failing to understand how we have a wave of sympathy for the mother here, hopped up on speed and booze.


As far as the home-owner, I think he is going to go down for this. To put it in persepctive, I know of a story where a TX home owner had 5 illegals trying to kick in the door one night (ignoring his warnings that he had a gun) and he still waited patiently for the police to arrive instead of blasting them, when it was within his full rights to shoot them.

The neighbor's kid is a punk, he is disrespectful, he cuts across your yard on a regular basis, and yes that would make me angry- but you don't have a legal or moral right to shoot him.

This guy might be spending his golden years in gen pop. :(
 
By the habits of the mom you can see why the kid never learned what's right or wrong. It happens all the time and our society weeds out those who don't learn.

The kid paid the price for the parents failure and then mom paid her own price of failure. Darwin at work.

jj
 
If you go on a mans property you better know where the line is.
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At 15, kids ... should know better than to trespass.
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trespass? trespass?

If people had shot at us every time we cut through a yard when I was growing up, I am not sure there would have been any of us left alive.

Our next door neighbor's yard was the "cut through" to the basketball courts at the school, my buddy down the street's yard was the cut through to the baseball fields.

Our yard was a cut through until fenced in the yard for our dog. But all the kids knew the dog, and they didn't hesitate to cut through our yard if that was closer. My mom only fussed at them if they didn't close the gate behind themselves and let the dog out. She'd run around to the front of the house and stand at the door with her tail wagging until my mom saw her.

The way we walked to the pool probably had us cutting through five or six yards, and crossing a creek on a fallen tree between two back yards.

We didn't know that we were all breaking the law, subject to being shot on sight. I thought we were just being kids.

Mike
 
trespass? trespass?

If people had shot at us every time we cut through a yard when I was growing up, I am not sure there would have been any of us left alive.

Our next door neighbor's yard was the "cut through" to the basketball courts at the school, my buddy down the street's yard was the cut through to the baseball fields.
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Yes I did that to when I was a kid but this a different violent world today. Young kids will kill you at the drop of a hat. There are millions of illegal alien criminals allowed to stay in the country, that commit a large percentage of the violent crimes.
A Mother can't even walk through Wal Mart without watching that her child doesn't get over 5 foot away, but when I was a young kid we played as far away from home as we could run.


But today, trespass on my land and the least that will happen to you will be, you will be looking down a gun barrel.

From the available information, I probably would not have shot as quick, but I would have a gun in my hand.
 
By the habits of the mom you can see why the kid never learned what's right or wrong. It happens all the time and our society weeds out those who don't learn.

The kid paid the price for the parents failure and then mom paid her own price of failure. Darwin at work.
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Impressive how you got all that out of an article so sparse on details.
 
IMO, trespassing through even a fenced-in yard is not a qualification to get a bullet in the arse. There has to be something more here. Has the shooter been the victim of vandals/burglers? I know Texas law is different, but from a moral standpoint you need a reasonable belief that your life is in danger to justify shooting.
I have neighbors (of questionable character) that trapse through our driveway and yard(at all hours of day and night) because at one point before we moved in, our driveway was used as an alley. Even though the possibility of driving through is no longer there, and it's obvious it's private property, it still happens. We've also had at least one attempted break-in, and several thefts from the back porch.

Even IF Ohio's laws were the same as Texas, I would find it hard to justify shooting someone traversing my yard unless I had definitive proof they were committing a crime, i.e. they have my car stereo in their hands. This is from a city standpoint. If I lived out in the boonies and had someone skulking about my yard at 10:30 at night, I'd have reasonable suspicion, but would probably still hold my fire until they attempted entrance or were otherwise a direct threat.

The legal responsibility is in no way determinate of moral responsibility. I suspect the gentleman over-reacted and nearly killed a kid in the process. Even if he's cleared, he'll have to live with the possibilities that may have stemed from his actions going through his head. His character will determine whether or not he feels justified or not. In the long run, we all have to face the judgement handed down from our own souls, as we live. Your own beliefs will tell you what lies after that.
 
There still has to be a causal link between the intoxication and the accident. If the at fault driver veers into the lane of a drunk, you'd have to show that the intoxication had some connection with the ensuing impact. Otherwise you have no nexus and no case.

As far as the underlying shooting, who knows. I suspect there's more to the story but that's for the grand jury to consider.
 
Meth in her system doesn't mean she was living the tweaker lifestyle. Methamphetamine has been used for decades by people to control their weight. Meth users can be the housewife who takes very small doses to keep her weight down, to the tweaker who stays up for days at a time and searches for the ultimate high.

The fact that she was drunk, had smoked marijuana and taken meth for whatever reason has no bearing on the use of force.

Jeff
 
...Devin Nalls and Brandon Robinson hopped a fence surrounding W.C. Frosch's property next door to check out a noisy party nearby.
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Yeah, this is trespass. Even stupid people know what fences are for. And they "hopped" the fence? What are they, track team high jumpers? And if the facts are exactly as the paper portrays (HAH!) I would love to have the ability of that 74 year old man, even right now. Hit a moving target outside from inside the house at night? Regardless of his culpability, he must be one heck of a shot!

Did the one kid deserve to be shot? Maybe, maybe not. There is a kid in our neighborhood who is traveling in that direction, but no one has done the deed yet. I suspect it will only be a matter of time though, before he crosses the wrong person, or gets caught red handed. Personally, I think that as he is approaching the age of driving, he will be a self correcting problem.

The drunk who caused the accident is definitely at fault.

The mother can at least be charged with not setting a good example. I know if my kid, or a friend of my kid, got shot while I was sitting around having a few beers, I might be induced to drive to the hospital instead of waiting to see if and when the emergency squad will show up. Around here we can just about die of old age waiting for them to figure out where we live.

Do we know if she was raising him improperly? No. She evidently had her own faults, but don't we all? I have seen children raised all their life, being taught the right and the wrong thing to do, only to choose the wrong one almost every time.

And what about Dad? Where was he when all this was going on? His statements sound a little too hard to believe. I think he has a lot of questions to answer on several levels.

There are a lot of inferences, but not many facts, that can be drawn from a newspaper article. I am always amazed at the superior insight of so many people.
 
As they passed the front porch along State Highway 243, Mr. Frosch fired one shot from inside his home, striking 15-year-old Brandon under his left arm, police said.

Mr. Frosch, 74, maintains he thought the boys were about to break into his house. Authorities initially cited the state's "castle law" in declining to arrest him. Passed last year, the law gives property owners the right to use deadly force against another person in defending themselves if they reasonably believe the person is committing or is attempting to commit certain crimes.

But a grand jury indicted Mr. Frosch in May on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The second-degree felony is punishable by two to 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
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Bolding mine. That description doesn't sound like they were on the porch.
Right now, Mr. Frosch's problems center around convincing other people that, at the time, he reasonably believed they were attempting to break in to his home. IOW, he's in the realm of trying to convince them that what he did was legal, not necessarily moral or ethical.
He'd be an idiot to publicly admit the slightest doubt about his own actions right now; so quite likely he and his lawyer will paint this as "frightened old man defending himself from a perceived attack." It won't surprise me if he walks on this.
When the papers are done covering this and we've long since gone on to bickering about other things, he still has to live with what he did. Other people get to decide whether what he did was legal. In his heart, only he knows whether what he did was right.
 
Meth in her system doesn't mean she was living the tweaker lifestyle.
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Exactly my thoughts.

I am also altogether sure that I have all the facts about her. If she's had multiple DWIs, that would change my opinion.

When Ms. Nalls died, her blood-alcohol content was 0.08, the level at which a motorist can be charged with driving while intoxicated.
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If this is the one and only time she's gotten behind the wheel drunk, I would honestly cut her some slack. She may have decided that she could drive her son to the hospital safely - and we have no indication she was correct about that. 911 ambulance runs can take a very long time - especially if your son is bleeding out from a gunshot wound.

I don't drink alcohol. But I can imagine a mother who is barely over the legal limit deciding to risk a drive to the hospital to save her child.

Traces of marijuana were also in her system, indicating she had taken the drug within a few weeks of her death, Dr. Barnard said, though that drug was not active.
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So there is no indication that she was high that day - there is an indication that she had smoked pot sometime in the last couple of weeks. I am an old man 55, and when I hear that someone has smoked some pot, I don't run for the hills, screaming, "Oh, no! Pot! Charlie Manson's going to get me! Oh, no! Oh, no!"

For people my age and younger, pot is quasi-legal. I don't smoke dope anymore, but I don't consider smoking a joint much evidence of criminality.

So we could have a serious party animal tweaker careening around the streets out of control. Or we could have a mom who's taking some kind of diet pill who had a beer or two and when confronted with a bleeding child, tried to get him to the hospital.

Mike
 
One of the guys at work lives in Kaufman and he knows the older guy who shot that boy.

After this happened he said that it didn't suprise him that he finally shot someone any as the old man was constantly calling the police out there for minor complaints that anyone else would have shrugged off as no big deal and had a habit of waving guns around to make sure people took him seriously.

To me it just sounds like he's a crotchety old guy who wanted to shoot someone and that he found an excuse. I wouldn't convict the homeowner on the basis of what one of my co-workers said about him, but it sounded like it was a pretty fair characterisation as my co-worker isn't exactly known for having a bad word to say about anyone and he isn't known for adding embellishments to make a story better.

We're all familar with that type of older guy and I'm sure that a few of us had to deal with guys like that before. This time the crotchety old bugger who's pissed off at the world just happened to be armed and he actually took a shot at one of the kids which unleashed a chain of events which had tragic consequences.

However whether the nurse was killed while driving the boy to the hospital or if she was intoxicated or not it shouldn't really have any bearing on what happened out at his property. The authorites obviously think that there's cause for prosecution so let 12 jurors who have all the facts decide whether he's guilty or not.

Here's another story about it.

Kaufman man indicted for shooting incident
http://www.kaufmanherald.com/articles/2008/06/03/news/doc483e0cff68e6c913197722.txt

Kaufman case doesn't fit castle law's intent, lawmaker says
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-castlesider_17met.ART0.State.Edition1.4604bc1.html

He stated in the Dallas Morning News that even though it was at night that he had lights up and that he could see what was going on in his yard. Since he could obviously see that it was two kids walking through his yard (one of whom he knew as it was his neighbors boy) it doesn't sound like he's going to have much of a defense.
 
The first thing you need to understand about this whole mess is WHERE it occurred: the Texas Hill Country is NOT the bucolic rural Walden Pond a lot of you seem to assume it is. In recent years the meth labs have sprouted like dandelions and the associated crime rate has soared. Local law enforcement is normally unequipped to deal with heavily armed, drug-crazed cookers and their families. Live a while among these people before you think Ozzie and Harriet still inhabit the area. Mr. Frosch may very well and quite rightly have been in fear for his life, especially if he was previously acquainted with these kids and their friends. There are a fair number of our neighbors that I would certainly NOT like to see on my property, day or night. Everyone understands the meaning of a fence, those who claim otherwise are lying. It is also entirely possible that the old man is mad as a March hare, there's a lot of that going around too. The whole incident is regrettable, but should serve as an object lesson that there is no substitute for personal responsibility. Everything would still be fine had the boys not chosen to trespass on their crotchety neighbor's fenced yard, end of story.

rr2241tx
 
"It doesn't change a thing," Sgt. Brandon Negri of the Department of Public Safety said of the toxicology results. "She was not doing anything wrong in terms of her driving."
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Drunk driving is only a crime in certain cases.


"The truth is what I say it is!" - Ned Beatty


.
 
The guy that did the shooting was like 72... Honestly, for a 72 year old to "hear a noise" it has to be a pretty loud noise. These kids were most likely terrorizing the geezer, he got scared, fired and the druggie mom rushes the kid to the hospital and had the dumb luck to contribute to her own demise and get hit by a drunk...

Like a parade of fools...

Leave the old man alone.
 
In the absence of any facts about what the kid was doing why don't you leave the kid alone too? You are surmising that they were "most likely terrorizing the geezer" but what proof do you have of that?
 
Right now, Mr. Frosch's problems center around convincing other people that, at the time, he reasonably believed they were attempting to break in to his home.
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And again there's that pesky Texas statute. He does NOT have to convince anyone they were attempting to break into his home.

He has to convince people that they were committing "Criminal Mischief" in the nighttime, and that's a pretty broad thing.

Originally there was going to be no charge filed but the DA later changed his mind. I suspect the mind changing came from public pressure after Saint Mom here was killed in the car wreck.

So, he's still charged but if he can show the boys were in the act of criminal mischief he's clear, or at least covered under the statute anyway.


Penal Code 28.03 describes it. In part it is:

§ 28.03. CRIMINAL MISCHIEF. (a) A person commits an
offense if, without the effective consent of the owner:
(1) he intentionally or knowingly damages or destroys
the tangible property of the owner;
(2) he intentionally or knowingly tampers with the
tangible property of the owner and causes pecuniary loss or
substantial inconvenience to the owner or a third person; or
(3) he intentionally or knowingly makes markings,
including inscriptions, slogans, drawings, or paintings, on the
tangible property of the owner.
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It also goes into more detail about phone lines, gas lines etc but it's a pretty broad thing.

Note that there's no dollar value assigned. They could simply break a board in the fence.
Again this is the legal side, not the "whether or not he should have shot" thing.
 
He has to convince people that they were committing "Criminal Mischief" in the nighttime, and that's a pretty broad thing.
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Okay. Since you know more about your system and your people down there than I do, how serious is he going to have to make what he believed the two teens were doing look in order to walk on this, in your opinion? Will a typical Hill Country jury buy that being on his lawn at night constitutes criminal mischief, in your opinion?
 
Does anyone know at what range he took the shot? Are we talking a 40 yard or greater shot? Is so i woudl find it hard to believe the man thought they were breaking into his house. Or was this a 10 yard shot in which case if they are headed in his direction (while i wouldnt take the shot) seems to support his fear. I just need more info on it.

As for the women being intoxicated, she shouldnt be poorly looked upon. She was from what the story said following all traffic laws. A vechile crossed the lane and hit her. She could have been blind and using her sense of smell to drive it still wouldnt change the fact she did not cause the accident.
 
Will a typical Hill Country jury buy that being on his lawn at night constitutes criminal mischief, in your opinion?
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How do you know that they were only on his lawn? Did they break the gate to get in? Did they break anything else while there?

We've only heard tiny pieces of this from the media and, as in the Joe Horn case, only the parts that paint the shooter to be the bad guy.

I made the prediction then that Joe Horn would be no billed and everyone laughed.

I'll make the same prediction now, that this guy will be found not guilty.

He shouldn't have even been charged, and wasn't until public pressure was applied because the tragedy with the mom made the public want some "revenge" somehow, even though the 2 incidents are not connected.

In the end I think he'll be cleared of any wrongdoing. Still gonna cost him a fortune and it still might not have been a wise move but I think he'll prevail in court.

Guess we'll see in a few months.
 
She was from what the story said following all traffic laws. A vechile crossed the lane and hit her. She could have been blind and using her sense of smell to drive it still wouldnt change the fact she did not cause the accident
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Agreed, Being legally drunk (.08) doesn't take more than 2 beers, and I know most of you will agree being legally drunk and being drunk and impaired are two different things.

I once got a dwi in college that was dismissed by the judge. I was leaving a bar at midnight and as soon as I started my car I got a knock on the window. I hadn't moved an inch or even put the car in drive, and here were 2 officers who said I needed to step out of the car because I had "staggered" over to it. I stepped out, took 6 different sobriety tests and passed them all. Well, Officers Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum weren't happy I passed, so they made me wait 30 minutes until a different officer could show up with a breathalyzer to use. I blew a .08 on the dot and was arrested. Well all this had been caught on the dashcam, and after viewing the video and listening to testimony from both officers, both of which admitted I had passed all the field sobriety tests, the judge threw out the case and told the officers if they brought him any more cases like mine he'd penalize them for wasting taxpayers money, his time, and the city's resources harrasing people.

Needless to say, I learned my lesson about bars and police officers, and now I never drink and drive. But I will not agree I was impaired in any way. And I will not agree that whatever she had been doing mattered because the guy that had hit her WAS drunk.
 
How do you know that they were only on his lawn? Did they break the gate to get in? Did they break anything else while there?
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Were they? Did they? You tell me; you seem to be operating under the assumption they were. If you have additional information, please share it.

He shouldn't have even been charged, and wasn't until public pressure was applied because the tragedy with the mom made the public want some "revenge" somehow, even though the 2 incidents are not connected.
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He shouldn't have? What information do you have that leads you to a different conclusion than the people who charged him?
 
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