It was a quiet Monday afternoon for a couple in Salem, Indiana, at least until a man drove his car into a couple’s yard and threatened the homeowner with a firearm.
According to the Indiana State Police, that man was saved thanks to the quick response from his wife, who spotted what was going on while still inside the family’s home.
Police said officers found Michael Chastain in the front yard with a gunshot wound. He was taken to Saint Vincent Hospital in Salem, where he was pronounced dead.
According to a news release Tuesday, the incident started when Chastain drove through the front yard, grabbed the homeowner, forced him to the ground and pointed a gun at his head. The homeowner’s wife saw it happen and shot Chastain with her handgun.
The investigation continues, and the case will eventually be turned over to the Washington County Prosecutor’s Office, according to the news release.
Warren Smith Jr., 32, of Florissant, was charged with second-degree murder soon after the Sept. 7, 2022, killing of Kardaye’ Moore inside the Beverly Hills Supermarket, at 6714 Natural Bridge Avenue. The shooting was caught on surveillance video in the store showing it stemmed from a fight between Smith’s cousin and Moore.
Chris King, a spokesman for St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell’s Office, said in an email that the office dismissed the case last week after a “closer review of the evidence.”
“When we slowed the surveillance video down, it appears that the defendant pulled his gun after the deceased began shooting,” King wrote. “We couldn’t proceed with prosecution ethically with a valid self-defense claim.”
Smith’s defense attorney Richard P. Hereford said the charge should have been dismissed earlier. The case was set to go to trial Monday before prosecutors dismissed it.
“He should have never been charged,” Hereford said. “It was clearly a case of self-defense.”
Investigators with Indiana State Police told WDRB News that Chastain is well-known in the area, and has a criminal background. He dated the homeowner’s daughter, but she no longer lives at the home, so police aren’t sure why he targeted her father.
There are multiple possibilities, but I wonder if Chastain had other plans for the woman after he’d killed her parents, in which case the woman who shot and killed her husband’s attacker may very well have saved her own life and her daughter’s life as well. With Chastain no longer able to answer questions from investigators we may never know what led him to target the man, but based on this additional information it seems even more certain that this was a justifiable shooting on the part of the armed homeowner who protected her husband from harm.
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