Widowed Teen Mother Asks 911 If She’s Allowed to Shoot Intruder to Protect Herself and 3 Month Old Baby
January 5th, 2012
News stories just don’t get more inspiring than this. If you enjoyed last week’s story about an 11 year old girl using a gun to defend herself from three armed burglars, get a load of this: Sarah McKinley, an 18-year-old mother from Oklahoma, who tragically lost her husband to cancer on Christmas Day of 2011, found herself and her three-month-old son in danger on New Year’s Eve when two men tried to break into her home, aggressively banging on doors and hitting them with their shoulders to gain entry. Thinking fast, McKinley moved a couch in front of one door to block it, took her baby to the bedroom, and put a bottle in his mouth to quiet him.
That’s when McKinley called 911 while brandishing two guns, a 12-gauge shotgun and a pistol. As the 911 emergency response operator spoke with McKinley to keep her calm, the teen mother asked for permission to shoot the intruders: “I’ve got two guns in my hand. Is it OK to shoot him if he comes in this door?” The dispatcher, Diane Graham, told McKinley to do whatever she needed to do to protect herself: “Well, you have to do whatever you can do to protect yourself. I can’t tell you that you can do that, but you do what you have to do to protect your baby.”
Graham remembered that during her training she was told that dispatchers cannot instruct a caller to shoot someone, but she did want to make it clear that McKinley needed to do whatever she had to do to keep herself and her infant son safe from these intruders. Graham told one reporter, “as a mother, I wanted her to protect her baby.” The district attorney said of Graham’s answer, “I would agree with that advice.” McKinley agreed with that advice as well: when one of the two intruders came through her door holding a 12-inch hunting knife, she pulled the trigger on her 12-gauge shotgun, killing the intruder and spooking his accomplice who fled.
As if the tragedy of losing her husband to cancer at such a young age and with a three-month-old baby to raise wasn’t enough, this young woman had to face a horror that no one should ever have to face, an attack on her home by armed criminals. But Sarah didn’t let herself nor her son be a victim that night. She had the means to protect herself from violence, a right guaranteed to her in the U.S. Constitution, and thanks to her dispatcher, she knew that it was okay to do whatever necessary to protect herself and her baby from her attackers.
My heart goes out to Sarah for her loss and I am incredibly inspired by her confident defense of home and family. Who on earth could disagree with me when I say that I am so glad she had a gun to defend herself this weekend?
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