Opinion ID: 2159891
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Shootings

Text: On November 7, 1994, appellant shot and killed his stepfather, Ronald Jones, and, minutes later, shot and wounded another man, Melvin Seals. Appellant denied shooting Seals and claimed that he acted in self-defense when he shot and killed Jones. Appellant's grandmother, Martha McConnaughey Higgs, testified that on the evening of November 7 Jones was sitting alone in her kitchen while she was in an adjacent room. [2] She saw appellant enter the kitchen empty-handed, and soon thereafter she heard gunshots from the kitchen. She entered the kitchen and found Jones lying on the floor, bleeding and unconscious. Sometime after the shooting, Mrs. Higgs saw appellant wandering around the hall with the gun, so she took the gun from him and put it in the basement so that the police didn't see it. Appellant claimed that when he entered the kitchen, he found Jones pointing a gun at him; a struggle ensued, and he shot Jones in self-defense during the struggle. He presented evidence that Jones' stay at the Higgs home had been turbulent and that Jones had a history of mental illness and violent criminal behavior. Appellant also testified that, on the night before the shooting, he and his grandmother had argued with Jones, and in response Jones had threatened to kill everybody in the house. Melvin Seals was visiting the Higgs household that evening. After a disagreement with appellant concerning a $12 debt, Seals left the house and sat on a neighbor's porch. As he was sitting there, his friend Marty McGill came out of Mrs. Higgs' house and said to Seals, Man, Link [appellant] just did that to his stepfather. Seals then heard appellant say, Where [is] Melvin at? When McGill replied, Melvin ain't out here, appellant told him to stop lying. A moment later, appellant reached his arm out through the open doorway of the Higgs house and fired three shots toward Seals. Seals ducked, then jumped up and ran around the corner, but as he ran, he was shot in the right shoulder. He kept running until he reached a nearby firehouse, where he told a paramedic that he had been shot. When the police arrived, appellant ran out the back door of the house. Police officers gave chase and eventually detained him after he tried to hide in a neighbor's back yard. At the police station, appellant told the investigating detectives that he would show them where he hid the gun that he had used to kill Jones. He took them to the garage of Mrs. Higgs' house, but no gun was found. He later returned to the house with the police and asked Mrs. Higgs to give the police the gun, but she did not produce it. The officers informed Mrs. Higgs that they were securing the area while they obtained a search warrant. A few minutes later, Lola McConnaughey, appellant's aunt, attempted to leave the house with a backpack, stating that she was going to work. The police told her she could not leave with the backpack, but Ms. McConnaughey managed to slip out the back door with it, and her mother, Mrs. Higgs, locked the door behind her and blocked the officers' access to the door. The gun used in the shootings was never recovered. In an upstairs bedroom, however, the police found a red bag containing a holster and a box of Winchester .32 caliber semi-automatic ammunition. There was evidence that appellant slept in that room regularly, but the room was open to and used by other family members. Appellant testified that the red bag did not belong to him and that he had never seen it before. Lola McConnaughey testified that she saw two guns under a mattress in the basement on the day after the shooting. One of the guns was a silver handgun. Four .32 caliber metal-jacketed bullets were recovered from the house: one from the front porch, one from the dining room, and two from the kitchen. Four .32 caliber automatic shell casings were also recovered, one from the front porch and three from the kitchen floor. A firearms expert testified that the bullets found at the scene were of a type generally used in semi-automatic pistols and that they were all fired from the same gun. The shell casings were manufactured by Winchester, and both the shell casings and the bullets were likely fired from a semi-automatic .32 caliber pistol. The medical examiner concluded that Jones died from two or three gunshot wounds to the head and that there appeared to be no physical findings of injury that would [indicate] a struggle may have occurred.