In what some believe will be a new test for Texas’s stand your ground law, a homeowner has been charged with murder after he shot and killed a man parked on his driveway.
The homeowner, 65-year-old Terry Duane Turner, was arrested last week and charged with murdering Adil Dghoughi, the Caldwell County Sheriff’s Office said.
Turner’s defense attorney told CNN his client was defending himself and his property during the Oct. 11 incident. According to a police affidavit, Turner woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom when he saw a car parked in his driveway with its lights off.
He returned to his bedroom to retrieve his handgun and ran outside to confront the person in the vehicle. At that point, according to Turner, the car turned its lights on and began to reverse out of the driveway.
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Turner “struck the front driver’s side door window twice with his handgun” and fired the gun, striking the driver, the affidavit said.
Dghoughi’s girlfriend, Sarah Todd, told CNN she believes her boyfriend had gotten lost and had pulled into Turner’s driveway to look up directions. At this point, there does not seem to be any connection between the two men.
Turner turned himself in to the sheriff’s office on Friday, and his attorney said his client is cooperating with the investigation.
“I just killed a guy,” he told the 911 operator the night of the incident. He also claimed that Dghoughi “started racing away and I ran after him. He pointed a gun at me, and I shot.”
Investigators did not recover a firearm in Dghoughi’s car, but they did recover a single spent shell casing on the driver’s side of the vehicle.
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Texas’s stand your ground law is found in Chapter 9 of the Texas Penal Code and stipulates that deadly force is justified if that force is “imminently necessary” to protect a person against another’s use of deadly force, aggravated kidnapping, murder, sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated robbery.
Turner’s task will be to convince a jury or a judge that his use of deadly force was justified based on the circumstances of the incident.
“If a person uses excessive or deadly force when their life was not really in danger, it can be difficult to defend their actions,” Texas law firm, Simer & Tetens notes. “To raise the defense, you will have to prove that you did not provoke the person who attacked you and that you were not breaking any laws at the time the incident occurred.”
Turner was released on bond on Friday.