LDN.House cleaner who was mom of 4 fatally shot after mistakenly going to wrong home, police say.LDN
A 32-year-old cleaning crew worker who went to the wrong home to work was shot and killed in Whitestown, Indiana, on Wednesday morning, police said.
The worker, identified as Maria Florinda Rios Perez, according to NBC News and WTHR-TV, had tried to use keys in her hand to get into a new client’s home when she was shot.
The home she intended to go into was behind the one where she and her husband went, The New York Times reported.
Rios Perez’s husband, Mauricio Velazquez, told WRTV in Indianapolis that he and his wife had been cleaning homes for seven months. Velazquez said he was standing with her at the home’s front door on Wednesday morning but didn’t realize she had been shot until she fell into his arms, bleeding.
“It’s so unjust. She was only trying to bring home the daily bread to support her family,” Rios told NBC News. “She accidentally went to the wrong house, but he shouldn’t have taken her life.”
Police officers found Rios Perez dead just before 7 a.m. Wednesday on the front porch of the home in Whitestown, an Indianapolis suburb of about 10,000 people, according to a police news release.
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On a fundraising page, her brother described Rios Perez as a mother of four children. Police said Friday that she was from Indianapolis but the family plans to bury her in Guatemala, according to her obituary and her brother’s fundraising page.
Officers initially responded to a report of a possible home invasion. Police are still investigating what happened.
“This remains an active and ongoing investigation into the fatal shooting. The facts gathered do not support that a residential entry occurred,” the police department said in a statement on its Facebook page.
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Authorities have not publicly identified the shooter. Police turned over the findings from their investigation to Boone County Prosecutor Kent Eastwood on Friday afternoon, but the prosecutor said the decision on whether to file charges won’t be easy.
The case brings Indiana’s castle doctrine laws squarely into play, he said. Those laws allow a person to use reasonable force, including deadly force, to stop what they reasonably believe is an unlawful entry into their dwelling. Thirty-one states have similar laws on the books, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In similar cases elsewhere, prosecutors have successfully brought charges against people who opened fire outside their homes, including a guilty plea by an 86-year-old man who shot Ralph Yarl after the Black teenager came to his door by mistake. In New York, a man was convicted of second-degree murder for fatally shooting a woman inside a car who came down his driveway by mistake.
Eastwood said he will have to pore over investigators’ findings to understand what happened in the moments leading up to the shooting. That means reviewing “every second” of witnesses’ taped interviews and doorbell footage if police bring him any, he said.
“You need to understand all the details so you can understand what happened and what is reasonable,” Eastwood said. “One of the hardest things today in this world is to agree on what’s reasonable. As a prosecutor, those are things we have to grapple with.”
