In the quiet outskirts of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, past the end of the paved road, a vagrant had been wandering around creepily for a day or two. This put the neighborhood on edge. As Trooper Scotty Sharp observed, “it’s very rural, but they look out for each other back in that area.”
On Friday, although several residents had seen the man and reported him to Kentucky State police, officers hadn’t crossed paths with him yet. That changed around noon, when police got a report of a would-be burglary cut short by an armed resident, who had scared the intruder away with a gun.
Then, while the trooper was still at the scene of that crime, a second home invasion was reported in the area. This time, the invader was still on premises, because he’d been shot by the homeowner.
“This is still early in the investigation,” Sharp said to reporters, “but we anticipate this will be the same suspect.”
The ventilated suspect was airlifted to a hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries, and charges against him are pending. Neither of the homeowners are likely to be charged with any crimes.
It’s hard to understand how someone can become detached enough from his own survival instinct to get run out of one home at gunpoint — truly lucky to escape with his life — only to put that same revolver to his head a second time. Metaphorically speaking.
What’s not hard to understand is that in a neighborhood like this one, a neighborhood that resembles much of flyover USA, guns are an essential tool for those whose survival instincts are still very much intact.
My father lived out his last years in Carter County KY. My mothers family were all from KY. It’s a pretty place and the folks in the small towns and rural areas tend to look after one another. And most of those folks own a gun.
My father was no exception. He was not really a POTG. He wouldn’t own a handgun and while we never talked about it he would have probably been ok with mag limits and AWB’s.
But he always had a shotgun. And he knew how to use that shotgun. And he would have went to his neighbors aid in a heartbeat. Country folk are like that.
You can’t fix stupid.
There is a permanent fix that they attempted. 😉
True.
@ Dan Zimmerman, the article/digest BY KAT AINSWORTH |SEP 07, 2018 brushed over the off-duty, still in uniform, female Dallas police officer –who shot, until otherwise proven, a law abiding person within that law abiding person own apartment after ‘she’ supposedly and mistakenly entered that law abiding persons domain, –citing she mistook the apartment for hers.
Why was that article mixed in with a digest and not given its own space?
Was it to allow the content to be hidden and pushed off quickly as to not allow people to comment while it remains a hot topic? This site appears to repeatedly focus on areas like Chicago, IL with their problems, but when it comes to Texas LEO caught bending over a barrel –such as the incident involving this Dallas LEO *Amber Renee Guyger* who shot another person, while said person was within their own apartment; TTAG goes all quite.
Why is that?
I would really like to see this article have its own space right here on TTAG.
I think I remember it did have its own thread, besides being covered in several others, but not being a rabble-rouser or conspiracy theorist, I’m not inclined to look it up. You’re saying what? The commies made ’em do it or something?
It was part of a daily digest.
I believe he’s trying to imply that TTAG protects Texas cops who screw up while focusing on NYPD and CPD cops who do. Maybe the Texas cops just screw up less, because they have more familiarity with firearms or work in areas with lower crime rates than the CPD and NYPD.
WTF are you talking about? It was covered while it was hot, a lot of people commented on it. She immediately admitted her mistake. She was arrested and charged with manslaughter. It’s not a complex story.
lol yeah because TTAG always covers up for cops that fucked up
exactly what do you want? The shooter has been arrested for manslaughter. Her story is that she accidentally went to the wrong floor, the door was ajar, she thought she was being burglarized, and shot the guy. It’ll take awhile before evidence (neighbor witnesses, blood draw from shooter, etc) is released.
There. That’s about all that the story would contain other than speculation.
You can let it kill its self off though.
“Specific Deterrence”, however, does work 😉
Rural Kentucky? Drugs….
It’s not hard to understand at all. Meth is a helluva drug.
Why the he’ll was taxpayers money wasted on an airlift for non life threatening injuries to a wounded suspect???
I would like to know that myself.
Helicopters are freakin’ expensive!
You think helicopters are expensive? How about an ambulance ride? I have heard that a local ambulance ride can be as much as $8,000.
I can only imagine that a helicopter ride is in the $20,000 range.
I would love to be proven wrong and find out that a local ambulance ride is more like $700 and a helicopter ride is more like $2,000.
My last local ambulance ride, within 5 miles, all city, was 1200 bucks. Insurance covered it.
More than 10 years ago I dumped a dirt bike at a SRVA. Tore chunks out of me. A ranger pulled up as my son was cutting my pants leg off and asked if I needed a life flight chopper. I asked ‘how much’. He said ‘5 grand’. I said, ‘no thanks, my son will drive me in to the ER.’
Had him hit the concession stand and get me some tylenol. It was an hour to the ER.
And that’s just a fraction of what the taxpayers will be coughing up for his stay at the Iron Bars Hotel & Suites.
Out past the end of the road, it’d probably take an hour or more for an ambulance to show up, and then have to travel back the same distance, only slower due to the bad surface. Where I live, it is much easier to life flight out on a helicopter than to bring an ambulance, perhaps as far as two hours away, to pick someone up to transport to the nearest hospital. I’m guessing this was the same deal.
Two hours by ambulance is still cheaper than ten minutes in a chopper.
For non-life threatening injuries, he can wait.
Correction: He can walk.
The problem is that the officer on the scene couldn’t likely judge what was and what was not life threatening. He sees a bullet hole, he’s calling life flight. The department doesn’t want a wrongful death suit if he’s wrong and they wait.
@ jwtaylor
Can’t we have an objective standard for ventilated bad guys?
Maybe a measuring cup with a stop watch? Ounces per second? 😉
“Sorry, sir, you are not leaking enough to merit a helicopter ride on the taxpayer’s dollar.” 😀
Uh, I can say this from first hand experience, EMS service in the area has been stretched thin lately. Hardin Co only has a few trucks out at any given time, with at least one of those out of the county making hospital go hospital transfers. During that time, the chopper serves as backup.
So I’d imagine the other trucks were on calls
I was turning out west on us 62, I did see one police with blue followed by an ambulance about a minute later then several police. So there was an ambulance and it was there pretty quick as it beat most of the police.
Ah, had no clue. Not an EMS guy, but I work somewhere EMS visits regularly in the area. They may have misjudged the extent of the injury, or EMS could have flat refused to take him (they can do that too). I do know the helicopter is used when there are too many trucks on run or out of county. I’d imagine they took him to Louisville, and Hardin Co EMS only allows one truck out of county at a time.
As to people acquiring to the cost, it’s EXPENSIVE. Though residents in Taylor Co. can pay a small fee and be airlifted for anything free of charge beyond the membership cost. Basically, it’s to ensure the company that flies keeps enough business to justify having the service in that area.
Why? Ummm, I’ll take a shot at that.
As regrettable as it might seem to some and perhaps to you, because in a civilized society it’s the right thing to do.
While expensive from a billing standpoint, actual payments of the exorbitant costs associated with air evacuation generally come from instance companies, as individuals generally do not bother to pay. I. This case, if the suspect had not yet been arrested, he may be personally on the hook, rather than the government.
More pointedly though, we have no idea at all was actually transpired here. There is so little fact or context available from this report that condemning a man to suffer or perhaps die of treatable injuries due to his having been accused of burglary would be barbaric.
That said, Elizabethtown isn’t so far from here, and isn’t much different from a mores and demographical standpoint. As it is in a great many rural communities, word of trouble, real or percieved, travels fast, and people tend to come to one anothers aid.
Here we have seen two successive waves of drug problems.
The first was oxy, the reaction to which has made availability almost non-existent for legitimate patients, and prohibitively expensive to unavailable on the street. Thus heroin is now readily available, cheap, and often cut with fentanyl, resulting is a massive number of overdoses, many fatal. Ambulance crews here abouts spend an inordinate amount of time administering narcan, with precious little left over for those suffering from non self inflicted medical emergencies. Prohibition at it’s finest: Vitually every single virtuous goal has been failed, and the overall situation made far, far worse, including for those who are innocent of involvement.
The second, which is now in full bloom is meth. Prohibition of cocaine brought us methamphetamine use on a massive scale. It is cheap, it’s easy to use, it is very powerful, and unlike opiates, the habitues of which tend to bother no one, or at least mostly themselves and thier own families , it drives highly agitated and often temporarily psychotic people into contact with the rest of us. The results are seldom good, and often enough end with the tweaker bleeding out.
The smart money is that the suspect above was tweaking when shot. These days it’s always tweakers.
Frankly, I challenge anyone to defend prohibition of almost any sort. The unintended consequences always outweigh any good that can come of it.
Incidentally, has anyone noticed the repetitive and ever expanding outbreaks of hepatitis A among restaurant workers? I venture this is a direct result of intravenous use of heroin, meth, or both. One longs for the good old days when heroin was an inner city, skid row problem, methamphetamine was taken in small, oral doses by truckers, and respectable folk snorted cocaine.
In over one hundred years of prohibition on opiates and cocaine, usage has increased, the strength of the preferred vectors has massively increased, the 2nd amendment has taken severe hits, the 4th has been gutted horribly, civil forfeiture has legalized robbery by the state, police have been militerized, the doctor patient relationship is now managed as if a political commisar were in the exam room, criminal gangs wound and kill thousands in American cities each year and overdoses rival car accidents as the leading cause of accidental death…tell me again how effective prohibition is?
Gun rights were a major factor when I retire in Kentucky, from the US Army. Here your car is an extension of your home. So you can have a gun in your car while parked in the lot of your anti gun business owner/ employer. Also if you have a KY carry permit you don’t have to pay for a background check for any future gun purchases. no waiting period. MGs ok. Gun mufflers ok. And they have the “shoot the arsonist law” here. Fire bugs if caught can be shot on site here.
Hah, I had not heard of a “shoot the arsonist law” before!
Kentucky was already in my top three choices of states to retire. That may have just propelled it to number 1 !!!
The ability to bypass a background check with a concealed carry permit is up to the business and isn’t mandated, but I’ve never had it be an issue. Walmart, Academy, LGS, all have had no issue accepted just the carry permit.
KY does have some great laws concerning firearms and self-defense.
Kentucky also has sensible laws on carry of weapons other than firearms. In KY, a CCW permit also covers batons, switch blades and about anything else you might want in that regard. My Ohio permit covers handguns and nothing else…so two pistols ok, a knife over 4 inches, a baton, brass knuckles? Forgetabouit.
Chased out of one home at gunpoint only to have the next homeowner shoot you for home invasion — you just cannot make this stuff up!
This happened at the end of lower Colesburg Road which I live on. I saw the police and ambulances responding as I was leaving Friday.
This is an excellent argument to make that even if you live in a peaceful rural area, you should be prepared to defend yourself. You never think it’s going to be you until you see the photo in the news.
Only things wrong with this story is the lack of follow up shots and the use of a shovel. Civilized or not. This society needs to be spending fewer resources of worthless scumbag P.O.S. like this and more taking care of productive members of society.
bet the bad guy had ties too Obama policy of save the indigent, let em take what they want of your hard earned goods and cash or better yet we let Gov give them everything (our hard earned cash) so that they have so much time on hands the have too steal for the thrill of doing something!
Good God fearing country folk, look out for their own, defend whats theirs!
E-Town is a Meth-head cesspool. Its a damn shame. There’s some beautiful places around there. You think with the Army Base that close by it’d be a nice place to be.
Every place is a meth-head cesspool these days. For 35 years the only meth I ever encountered here in rural southern Ohio was small oral doses limited mostly to truckers…now a tweaker has to be laid out or arrested damn near every day. In the last 5 years the incidents involving meth heads went from never happened to literally an every day problem. Even when they aren’t actively stealing, robbing or assaulting, they are profane, bizarre, disruptive, loud, threatening and quite literally stinking up the place. Crackheads would be a welcome replacement for tweakers.
Its stunning how fast tweakers go down hill. More to the crux of the problem though, meth has an insidious way of hiding the descent from the user. A tweaker will stand there, or more accurately jitter-bug around, hair askew, filthy, railing 100 mph in utter gibberish about paranoid delusions while standing in a dumpster with no pants on at 2 pm on a Tuesday, and then honestly wonder why you aren’t taking them seriously. It used to be, you’d see someone doing something inexplicable and wonder if they were nuts, now when you see someone acting in a bizarre fashion you merely note there is a tweaker about and go on with your day.
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