Armed Neighbor Saves Woman From Knife-Wielding Boyfriend

A Louisiana man is being hailed as a hero by his local sheriff's department after he shot and killed a man who was allegedly attacking his girlfriend with a knife. 

The incident unfolded early Monday morning in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, where deputies were called out to a subdivision near the town of Mandeville on a report of gunshots. When the deputies arrived, they found one male who was deceased as well as a woman suffering from stab injuries, and were quickly able to piece together what happened. 

Detectives with the STPSO Major Crimes Unit learned that the female had exited through a window of a residence and was attempting to get help from neighbors after her boyfriend attacked her inside the home. The boyfriend was attacking the female victim with a knife when a neighbor exited his residence and demanded he stop. When the suspect refused and continued the attack his girlfriend, the neighbor fired his weapon, striking the suspect. The suspect, identified by the St. Tammany Parish Coroner as 49-year-old Shawn Quinn, was pronounced deceased at the scene.

The victim was taken to a local hospital with what were described as non-life-threatening injuries, but were it not for the neighbor's armed intervention her injuries would likely have been far more severe, and perhaps even fatal. 

St. Tammany Sheriff Randy Smith described the attack on the woman as a "violent and extremely dangerous situation," adding that "the neighbor’s actions appear to have prevented further serious injury or loss of life." 

The armed citizen's actions have garnered some media attention in New Orleans, but its received no national news coverage at all despite the compelling narrative of a gun owner coming to the defense of their neighbor as she was being violently assaulted. With the shootings at Brown University and in Australia, as well as the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, that's not entirely unsurprising, but even when its a slow news day defensive gun uses are rarely mentioned by the national news media. 

With the alleged attacker dead instead of facing criminal charges, this incident will quickly fade from even the local headlines. For most of us, it will become a statistic; one of hundreds of thousands of DGUs that took place across the United States this year. But for the woman who was saved and the neighbor who saved her, the terrifying moments early Monday morning and the life-saving actions that were taken in defense of another will be forever etched in their memories.

I cannot fathom the fear and panic she must have felt as she frantically scrambled to escape her attacker by climbing out a window and desperately screamed for help into the darkness with the fervent hope that someone would respond before she was stabbed again. We have seen so many brutal crimes take place where no one intervened, and it would have been easy for the neighbor to have simply called 911 while lying in bed and decide that they had done enough. Instead, they answered those cries for help; initially trying to defuse the situation verbally, but putting an end to the threat to the woman's life when her attacker refused to stop. I don't know that we'll ever learn this armed citizen's name or hear from them directly, but whatever their name, they're a real-life superhero as far as I'm concerned. 

Editor’s Note: Defensive gun uses like this may not get much media coverage, but we feature them every day on the Bearing Arms Cam & Company podcast. 

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