Florida FAFO: Sheriff Warns Robbers to ‘Expect to Be Shot’

Two masked men started a home invasion in Bradenton, Florida. One man stopped it, another man died, and the third man will face felony murder charges. As Bradenton’s sheriff declared yesterday, the lesson from all of this is … don’t rob people in the Sunshine State, lest ye ‘find out.’

Sheriff Rick Wells told the media that this was a case of self-defense and praised the homeowner for protecting his home and his family. “This is the state of Florida,” an emotional Wells said at a press conference. “If you want to break into someone’s home, you should expect to be shot”:

Unless other facts come to light, this looks like a classic case of justifiable homicide in self-defense:

The couple had been enjoying their night at home when the husband got an alert from home security cameras about motion detected on the side of the house. As he checked the cameras, Wells said the homeowner saw two masked men outside trying to break in. 

He reportedly told his wife to get to a safe place and grabbed his gun before going to a spare bedroom/office where he was “immediately” confronted by one of the masked invaders.

The homeowner fired his weapon at least three times, hitting the masked man who was already inside the house. The other masked invader, who deputies later identified as 39-year-old Michel Soto-Mella from Chile, was climbing through the window but then quickly backed out of the house and ran away, Wells said.

Soto-Mella was later found by sheriff’s K-9s and deputies just a few blocks from the crime scene and was arrested. Wells said the sheriff’s office is working with Border Patrol because Soto-Mella reportedly entered the country in California from Chile and was given a 90-day visa that has since expired.

Bear in mind that some states do not necessarily allow for lethal force in self-defense even inside the home just for intrusion only. Their statutes may require a separate element of threat to bodily harm, while others may require an attempt to retreat first — even in the home. (Good luck prosecuting such cases where a break-in takes place without those other elements, though. Jurors will almost certainly put themselves in that position and find reasonable doubt, if not outright rejection of an indictment.) 

Florida is not one of those states, of course. The Florida statute on lethal self-defense explicitly states that there is no duty to retreat from anywhere a person has a legal right to be. Where a reasonable fear of either imminent death, great bodily harm, or “the imminent commission of a forcible felony” is present, lethal force can be used in self-defense.

Two men breaking into an occupied house wearing masks? Find me a person who wouldn’t fear “the imminent commission of a forcible felony,” not to mention the death and great bodily harm possibilities. It doesn’t matter what the perps intended — only whether the victims had a reasonable fear of any one of those outcomes. It doesn’t even matter in a legal sense for this question whether the perps themselves were armed, although apparently these perps were.

However, that matters for what happens next. If the sheriff says this is justifiable homicide, then who’s looking at murder charges? The perp who got away. Like many states, Florida holds anyone participating in the commission of a felony criminally responsible for any death that takes place during the crime. As Soto-Mella is about to find out, that even includes your partner when a victim kills him in self-defense:

Soto-Mella has been charged with armed burglary, but additional charges are pending.

Detectives could charge him with felony murder, since his accomplice died while carrying out a crime.

During his hearing, Soto-Mella insisted that he wasn’t armed, a declaration that the judge rejected as irrelevant at the arraignment. (That’s an argument for trial.) Here too, though, it doesn’t matter whether Soto-Mella himself had a weapon. If Flores-Toledo had a weapon, then both of them are subject to prosecution for armed robbery — and since that’s a felony, it would also make it a murder case against the guy who ran away. Prosecutors haven’t added the charge yet, but they have plenty of reasons to do so, especially to deter such criminals from showing up in Florida in the first place.

In other words, Soto-Mella’s FA lasted for a few minutes. His FO will likely go on for the rest of his life. Maybe such criminals should avoid Florida, and I’d recommend staying out of Texas as well. Just sayin’.