Two dead, one wounded, in Capitol View burglary 1 of 2



CRIME SCENE: Red police tape barely visible behind the black pickup marks house where shootings occured. Police blocked off a long stretch of the street to canvass neighbors and search for evidence.

Details remain sketchy but indications are that a suspected burglar was killed by police as he fled a house at 204 Thayer Street in which one man was later found dead and another man was seriously wounded.

Police got a call to the Capitol View neighborhood about a suspicious man jumping a fence to the house at 11:53 a.m. When an officer arrived, he saw a man with a handgun fleeing the scene. The officer fired and killed the man. It’s not yet known if the suspect fired any shots. He apparently was approaching the door of another house in his flight when he was shot by the officer.

Officers continued to investigate and found one man fatally wounded inside the house and another man with life-threatening injuries outside. Neither was a resident of the house, Police Sgt. Cassandra Davis said, but the Forbidden Hillcrest website quotes a neighbor who said the man fatally wounded was a neighbor who’d gone to check on the house. No information yet on the wounded man. The initial belief is that the burglar shot the two other victims.


The officer who shot the suspect also reportedly suffered some minor scrapes in the chase.

4 PM UPDATE: Still no IDs released. But Sgt. Davis said it was her understanding that a neighbor who saw the man go over a fence and notified the owner of the house did not go over to the house himself in response. He called the owner, who called police. Davis reconfirms that the two men shot in the house were NOT the owners of the house, but she said the men “had the permission” of the owners to be there. That is, it was her understanding that they were not there checking on a burglary report, but were simply in the house with owners’ permission when a suspected burglary occurred. She couldn’t say if they were friends, relatives or people working there.




CHARLES MURRY JR.

6 PM UPDATE: Police have identified the man shot by police as Charles Edward Murry Jr., 19. The sheriff’s office supplied the mug shot. Jail records show he was arrested March 8 and released April 30 on warrants charging him with several theft and burglary charges.

Angie Lauck, who lives three doors south of where the shooting took place, said she locked eyes with the burglary suspect as he tried to run from police.

“He looked crazy,” she said. “He had crazy in his eyes. I knew something bad was going to go down.”


Lauck was sitting in a sunroom when she saw a man carrying a gun run through a yard next door. She had to restrain her small dog as she stood watching at her front door.

“He was coming from my left. I was looking at him. He was frantic. We made eye contrct. I was scared. He reached around as if he was trying to grab something and all of sudden then I started hearing gunshots. I thought, oh my God, he’s going to shoot me and so I dropped to the ground.” Something went flying after the shots were fired. Lauck said she found a bullet clip on her porch front walk afterward. She presumes it may have been what the suspect was reaching for when shots broke out.

He stumbled after being shot the first time, Lauck said, then was shot several more times. She said then police appeared “from everywhere. I was so impressed.”

At 3:25 p.m., Lauck didn’t know more details about the other shooting victims and their relationship to the home where they were found. She, too, had heard the report that a neighbor had called the homeowner at work to report an intruder and that led to the call to police. The owner and a co-worker said they’d meet police at the house, according to radio traffic.

Forbidden Hillcrest has also posted an edited version of police radio traffic.

Property tax records list the owners of the house as Reggie Marshall and James Clements, who operate an interior design business. Efforts to reach them by phone at their business were unsuccessful.

— David Koon contributed to this report.