Justin Buist

Xavier provides the write-up and includes a video of the security footage.

Short story: Two perps come into the pharmacy and at least one of them pulls a gun. Pharmacist shoots one perp in the head with a .380 Kel-Tec which takes him out of the fight and onto the floor. The 2nd perp rushes out and he gives chase for a bit. Returns to the store, walks by the 1st perp with his back turned, possibly retrieved a 2nd handgun (Taurus Judge) at this point, or maybe he had done it earlier, and then shoots the 1st guy 5 more times in the stomach killing him.

Prosecutor charged him with first degree murder a few days later. Days after that the prosecutor is also charging 3 accomplices with murder after further researching the law.

Three things:

The first is that I’m amazed the prosecutor had to do any research to see if he could charge the accomplices. I thought felony murder charges were pretty much law school 101. If somebody dies while you’re pulling a felony job off you get charged with murder. I figure the prosecutor is either a doof, which would be a good thing for the pharmacist, or just really thorough, which would be a bad thing for the pharmacist.

The second is that I think we have a pretty good object lesson here in what not to do in a self defense shooting. It may turn out OK for the pharmacist in the end, but blabbing to the press was a really bad idea because I’m hearing the story is a little inconsistent with the video. Further, with no audio to go with the video we have no idea if any verbal commands were given to the 1st perp to stay down, etc. This is why you want to call 911 and get a recording rolling ASAP. In the video we see no sense of emergency or fear from the pharmacist. It looks like a silent execution. That won’t play well in front of a jury. His willingness to turn his back to the 1st perp also doesn’t look good, and in my opinion is a tactical error to boot. Hell, just leaving the store was a bad idea.

The third and final thing: This is another example of why you shoot for center of mass. I realize that with a tiny P3AT in his hands and under stress he was pretty lucky to get a shot to land anywhere, but once again we’ve seen a .380 smack somebody in the head and not disable them. The human skull is a tough thing to get through and pistols won’t do it on a regular basis. While “gunshot to the head” sounds like a really uber serious thing to suffer, in reality the 1st perp was knocked down by blunt trauma to the head with about the force of an angry 8 year old boy wielding a ball peen hammer. Well, assuming the bullet performed the typical trick where they hit the skull and bounce under the skin never penetrating beyond 1cm trick that they tend to do with small caliber pistols and head shots.