The above headline must be one of the most misleading that I’ve seen. It comes from the Associated Press, aided and abbetted by the AP leading sentence. From the washingtontimes.com:

BEND, Ore. (AP) – The man who shot and killed another person asleep inside a Bend home in 2012 is asking a court to throw out a wrongful death lawsuit against him.

Only one problem: the intruder wasn’t sleeping. He was actively fighting the couple that found him asleep in the homeowners house. There was an extensive investigation, and the shooting was ruled justified.

The story is all over the intertubes, with the factually incorrect headline and first sentence.

The Washington Times

From USA Today

At katu.com

The Roanoke Times

At pressofatlanticcity.com

At tucson.com

I have found only one source that corrected the headline: ktvz.com, a tv station in central Oregan. It is the local station where the case occurred. They only corrected the headline — Man who shot Bend intruder asks lawsuit to be tossed — and factually wrong first sentence because of complaints from people commenting at ktvz.

Here’s the story from when the shooting was ruled justified, after an extensive investigation, a year ago. From ktvz.com in 2015:

Perry, then 37, shot and killed Munoz, 33, early on the morning of June 24th, 2012, after returning to his Awbrey Butte home with his girlfriend, Amanda Weinman, of Eugene. They said they had returned to find an intruder had kicked in the door and was asleep on the couch. A fight ensued, and Perry said he shot the stranger in self-defense . . . Hummel said it was true Munoz was shot in the back, as his father had said, but added that Perry did so while Munoz was fighting with Weinman. “There was a bite mark on Amanda Weinman’s body above her breast and some minor bruising. And Shane Munoz also had bruising and contusions throughout his body,” Hummel said. Bend Police Chief Jim Porter said the evidence confirms what Weinman and Perry reported. “It was obvious for officers there, that the living room where this took place was extremely disrupted,” Porter said, adding that Bend PD spent over 500 hours on the investigation.

A shooting where the local police spent over 500 hours investigating, where there was extensive evidence of a protracted fight, becomes an AP headline of Man who shot sleeping intruder.

Later in the story, the AP sort of gets it right. But a lot of people only read the headline. A lot more only read the headline and the first sentence. Another trigger-happy gun nut shouting make my day!

The AP has been shown to be hostile to self-defense with firearms for decades. It’s time for them to start to tell the truth.

©2016 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

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