A Michigan woman was charged Tuesday with reckless use of a handgun after firing at a vehicle carrying shoplifters fleeing a Home Depot.
Instead of a "misguided attempt" to stop the vehicle using her gun, the woman, Tatiana Duva-Rodriguez, 46, of Clarkston, should have tried to take a picture of the license plate, the Oakland County prosecutor said.
"If this is proven, I find it very disturbing that someone would take out their gun in a busy parking lot and shoot at the tires of a passing car," said the prosecutor, Jessica R. Cooper. "Once fired, the bullet could have easily ricocheted or fragmented and injured or killed someone else."
The episode unfolded last week, the police said, when a man at a Home Depot in Auburn Hills, a suburb of Detroit, loaded a shopping cart with about $1,100 in merchandise, including power tools, a welder and a nail gun. He wheeled the cart past the cash registers and out the door, sprinting through the parking lot to a driver in a waiting sport utility vehicle, where the goods were loaded. The vehicle then sped off.
A Home Depot employee gave chase, yelling "stop" to no avail. And then another sound rang out: gunfire.
According to the police, Duva-Rodriguez, who is licensed to carry a concealed weapon, fired several shots from her handgun at the fleeing SUV. While the SUV got away, a 9-millimeter bullet flattened a rear tire. No one was injured, and there was no apparent damage to other cars or property, a police spokeswoman, Lt. Jill McDonnell, said.
On Tuesday, Duva-Rodriguez was charged with one count of reckless use, handling or discharge of a firearm. The shoplifting suspects initially escaped, but two men were arrested in the case several days later.
The shooting took place amid a national debate among gun control advocates and opponents, many who support the idea that armed citizens could help deter crimes and mass shootings.
McDonnell said the parking lot at Home Depot also served other large stores.
A video of the suspect in the store released by the police shows the suspect running through the lot, surrounded by parked cars but by few people. It does not show the gunfire.
"We are grateful that nothing more serious happened as a result of the decision to fire a weapon in a busy parking lot," the Auburn Hills police chief, Doreen Olko, said in the statement announcing the charge. "We do not encourage bystanders to insert themselves into incidents because of the potential for deadly consequences."
Michigan's state Constitution says a person has the right to keep and bear arms "for the defense of himself and the state."
To use a concealed weapon in the state, a licensed holder needs to think that there is an imminent danger of death, great bodily harm or sexual assault, said Rick Ector, a firearms trainer who runs a blog called Legally Armed in Detroit.
Donald Dawkins, a public information officer for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives office in Michigan, said law enforcement officials were required to demonstrate when firing their gun that they were under threat themselves or that they saw a suspect as a threat to others. McDonnell said she did not know whether Duva-Rodriguez had faced any imminent threat.
"I do not know that there was cause for her to do that," Dawkins said of the Auburn Hills case. "There is certainly reason to look into it."
Last month in Warren, Michigan, a Detroit suburb, a customer in a bank opened fire to stop an armed robber, hitting him once in the leg and once in each arm. The customer had a concealed-weapons permit.
"This citizen did have a Second Amendment right," the mayor of Warren, Jim Fouts, said in a report by The Detroit Free Press. But Fouts, who said the robber appeared to have threatened the 63-year-old customer, added, "I would caution people against using firearms unless absolutely necessary."
In an incident similar to the one at Home Depot, a shopper on Monday fired at people believed to be shoplifters in a store parking lot in Elkhart, Indiana, the police said. An armed shopper joined store employees who were chasing two people and fired when they got into their car, the police said.
On the Auburn Hills Police Department's Facebook page, the video of the Home Depot shoplifter got thousands of views and drew comments in support of and against the actions of the woman who opened fire.
"Why is it OK to shoot at a car of a shoplifter?" one person wrote.
"It should be OK," another replied.
"Really?" wrote a third. "Letting anyone shoot at people to protect the inanimate consumer goods of a giant corporation is more important than a human life?"