When the Gun Is in the Other Hand

Nelson Segovia was working alone at a Van Nuys jewelry store Valentine’s Day when four armed robbers threatened him and a customer and took $75,000 in merchandise.

Just another robbery in the big city. Ordinarily, that would have been the end of the story. But as the bandits fled, Segovia followed them out the door with a .44-caliber pistol and shot two of them dead.

What’s the law on that?

The 39-year-old clerk’s reaction could strike some as natural and others as excessive. Legal experts warn there can be a fine line between justifiable killings and criminal behavior that can send the “good guy” to jail.

Under state law, homicides can be considered justified when armed citizens stop a fleeing felon or act to protect themselves or the lives of others. But those broad legal definitions leave a gray area for an armed citizen to consider in a high-stress moment and prosecutors to ponder at length later on.

“A person kills lawfully if it’s done with the honest and reasonable belief in the necessity to defend against imminent peril to life or great bodily injury,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Cohen, former filing deputy at the Van Nuys branch.

“But the operative words here are ‘honest’ and ‘reasonable.’ If the belief is not reasonable, then the killing isn’t lawful.”

In Segovia’s case, police and prosecutors agreed that his actions were reasonable and lawful. But that was not their conclusion in 1995 when a North Hollywood apartment house manager shot a fleeing car burglar.

Plagued by a series of car break-ins, Daniel Bernard McDonald and his son, Mark, raced outside their apartment after hearing a car alarm at 3 on a December morning. Minutes later, while his son tussled with one burglar, McDonald fired seven shots at two others as they jumped into a getaway car.

When one of them died, McDonald was charged with--and convicted of--second-degree murder. A judge later reduced the conviction to voluntary manslaughter, with a minimum six-year state prison term, reasoning McDonald had acted intentionally but “without malice aforethought.”

“That was a case of an honest but unreasonable belief,” Cohen said. “That’s why legally it amounted to manslaughter.”

The most controversial recent Valley case, however, took place 11 months earlier when William Masters II of Sun Valley, out for a late night walk, got into a confrontation with two graffiti vandals, wounding one and killing the other.

The district attorney’s office refused to charge Masters with a felony, concluding he acted in self-defense. Nonetheless, the case ignited a fierce debate about crime and self-defense. Masters later was found guilty of a misdemeanor charge of carrying a concealed weapon and sentenced to three years’ probation.

In 1996, according to the state Department of Justice, 61 California killings were ruled justifiable. What did they have in common? Experts say it goes back to that perception of threat.

“The distinction should be whether the defender reasonably believes they are in serious peril,” said Florida State Criminology Professor Gary Kleck. “Serious,” he said, must be some harm beyond “having their feelings hurt or getting pushed or shoved.”

“It’s a gut-wrenching call because so many of these cases seem so close factually, but they have to be examined individually,” Cohen said. “We realize that on the street, people have to make split-second, life-or-death decisions.”