No such thing as a righteous shooting, I must disagree.

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

People here were quite up in arms when a shooting was described as righteous, I remembered about a shooting that seemed pretty righteous to me. Maybe we can agree about this one.

Cape woman shoots, kills rapist in her home

Before shooting and killing her rapist early Friday morning, a Cape Girardeau woman had never fired a shotgun in her life. Though the woman, whose name has been withheld, lived alone, she'd always felt safe in her neighborhood, where she'd lived for the past four years. When Ronnie W. Preyer, a registered sex offender who was about to be charged with assaulting her a week earlier, broke into her home shortly after 2 a.m. Friday, she said a calm settled over her as she shot him in the chest before running to a neighbor's to get help. Preyer, 47, of Cape Girardeau was pronounced dead a few hours later at Saint Francis Medical Center.

A dark bruise still marring the side of her face, the rape victim described the previous assault. She had been watching TV around midnight Oct. 25 when she heard a crash. She knew her basement door, leading up to her kitchen, was unlocked, and the noise had come from the basement. Realizing an intruder had broken into the house, she made a beeline for the back door, but Preyer was waiting for her. "You fight, you try to think of all the things you can do, but it's happening so fast," she said. Though she did put up a fight, Preyer punched her — twice, she thinks. At first, she couldn't believe it was really happening and feared someone was playing a horrible joke. He told her "Don't tell anybody. I know where you live," she said. The woman sat quietly for several hours before deciding she needed to notify the police. "I wasn't going to tell, but the more I thought about it, the worse I felt," she said.

She told her daughter and her landlord what happened, and her landlord repaired the window, added security devices to all the doors and, in a gesture that may have saved her life, purchased a shotgun for her. "I've never shot a shotgun before," she said. Her landlord instructed her on how to load the firearm, and she kept it near her for a week. Meanwhile, Cape Girardeau police began investigating the rape and made frequent rounds past her residence to check on things.
On Friday morning, about two hours after an officer had checked on her, she was still awake. "You can't sleep. You can't do anything. You're just listening," she said. When the lights went out, her first thought was that she remembered having paid her electric bill. "I knew something wasn't right," she said. She got her gun.

snip

http://www.semissourian.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081101/NEWS01/711019994

David