A suburban Detroit homeowner was charged Friday with second-degree murder in the death of a 19-year-old woman who was shot in the face while on his front porch nearly two weeks ago.
Theodore P. Wafer, 54, of Dearborn Heights, also faces a manslaughter charge in the death of Renisha McBride, who was killed in the early-morning hours on Nov. 2, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said.
Police say McBride, a former high school cheerleader, was shot a couple hours after being involved in a nearby car accident. Family members say she likely approached Wafer’s home for help.
The shooting has drawn attention from civil rights groups who called for a thorough investigation and believe race was a factor in the shooting — McBride was black; Wafer is white. Some have drawn comparisons between this case and that of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old Florida boy shot in 2012 by a suspicious neighbor.
But Worthy insisted Friday that race wasn’t relevant in her decision to file charges and wouldn’t compare the case to Martin’s death.
“It’s always interesting to me what the public makes their decisions on when it comes to one way or another,” Worthy said. “We have the facts. We have the evidence. We make our decision on that and that alone.
“In this case, the charging decision has nothing whatever to do with the race of the parties. Whether it becomes relevant later on in the case, I don’t know. I’m not clairvoyant,” she said.
What happened between when McBride crashed into a parked vehicle several blocks north of Wafer’s Dearborn Heights neighborhood and the shooting remains unclear.
Police received a 911 call from Wafer about 4:42 a.m., in which he tells the dispatcher: “I just shot somebody on my front porch with a shotgun, banging on my door.”
They found McBride’s body on the porch.
Evidence shows McBride knocked on the locked screen door, Worthy said, and there was no forced entry. The interior front door was open, and Wafer fired through “the closed and locked screen door,” said Worthy, who declined to discuss many details about the investigation.
“We do not believe he acted in lawful self-defense,” she added.
Under a 2006 Michigan self-defense law, a homeowner has the right to use force during a break-in. Otherwise, a person must show that his or her life was in danger.
Wafer was arraigned Friday afternoon on the murder and manslaughter charges as well as a felony weapons charge. A probable cause hearing was set for Dec. 18.
One of Wafer’s lawyers, Matt Carpenter, in seeking a lower bond, told the judge his “client has a very strong defense.”
Wafer is a 10-year employee at a local airport and has a clean record except for having been in court for past drunken-driving cases, Carpenter said.
A toxicology report released Thursday showed McBride, a 2012 Southfield High School graduate, had a blood alcohol content was about 0.22, more than twice the legal limit for driving. Her blood also tested positive for the active ingredient in marijuana.
Wafer’s brick bungalow is located in northeast Dearborn Heights, a town adjacent to Detroit and a diverse area that’s home to white, black and Arab-American residents. The neighborhood consists mostly of well-kept bungalows and small ranches, and is near a community college branch campus and a mosque. A neighbor said this week that Wafer lived alone.
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