SPANAWAY, Wash. — The family of a man shot and killed over the weekend is trying to figure out why he ended up banging on a neighbor’s back door.
It’s a mistake that ultimately cost him his life. Now, his family has a message for the homeowner who shot and killed him.
The man’s family is grieving, but at least one relative says she isn’t holding a grudge.
The Pierce County Sheriff’s Office says when the homeowner shot the man at his backyard door Sunday morning, he was acting in self-defense.
“We didn’t know he wasn’t here until the police came,” said 16-year-old Zaniyah Terry, the victim’s daughter. “We didn’t know my dad left.”
“When we found out the news, it was a shock,” she said. “I fell on my knees and I cried because I would have never thought that my dad would be gone.”
The Pierce County Sheriff’s Office says 36-year-old Russell Terry II, ‘Suge,’ as family and friends called him, was captured on his neighbors’ Ring cameras going from house to house, banging on doors early Sunday morning.
Then he banged on the door of one last house.
“The call came in at 1:45 a.m.,” said Pierce County Carly Cappetto. “And that he had stated there was someone banging at his back door and that moments after that, shots had been fired with that home intruder.”
Medics tried to revive Terry, but he died at the scene.
“My nephew was disoriented,” said Yvonne White, Terry’s aunt. “I know that. But that don’t make him a bad person.”
And, White says, her nephew was never violent, that they will likely never know why he left home, armed with a gun, nor why he was banging on his neighbors’ doors, except maybe trying to find his way back home.
“I knew him from newborn to 36,” she said. “And I know, in my heart, he was at the wrong place, and he didn’t know where he was at.”
The homeowner has an unlikely ally in White. She agrees with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office that he acted in self-defense.
And she forgives him.
But the final decision on whether to charge the homeowner will come from the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.
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