(MO) Bride-to-be shoots man who tries to steal her pickup 07-06-02
Bride-to-be shoots man who tries to steal her pickup 07-06-02
NOTE: I don’t have a link for this.
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Bride-To-Be Defends Her Pickup, Pulls Gun on Man Who Disrupts Wedding
Preparations
ap | 7/6/02
MOUNT VERNON, Mo. (AP) – Florists were hanging wisteria at Charlotte Ann
Neely-White’s home for her wedding when a stranger drove up, claimed
there was a bomb in his car, and made the mistake of demanding her
beloved pickup.
Neely-White had her fiance get her pistol, and while she fought with the
man, the gun went off, wounding the man in the chest.
A few hours later, Neely-White got married as scheduled.
“It was a long day,” the former public school principal said Friday.
“This lady was as calm as a cucumber. She can withstand anything. I
admire her guts,” said flower arranger Linda Cassidy. “I don’t think I’d
want to make her upset.”
Lawrence County Sheriff Doug Seneker said he had no doubt that
Neely-White acted in self defense.
Witnesses said the confrontation started about three hours before
Neely-White’s Fourth of July wedding.
The stranger “went rushing by and then he slammed on his brakes, and
then he came into the yard, and he said ‘Somebody call 911 quick,
there’s a bomb in my car,’” Cassidy said. “He was scared and excited,
and just kind of wired.”
Then he demanded that Neely-White give him her pickup.
She refused.
“Have you ever had anything you really love?
Well, I love that truck,” said Neely-White, 55.
She said the man threatened to set off the bomb if she didn’t give him
her truck. “I said, ‘No sir, you go ahead and set the bomb off. My house
needs work anyway.’”
Neely-White said the man attacked her with a riding whip, so she yelled
for her fiance, who had gone inside to call police, to grab her
.22-caliber pistol.
“I probably mowed my fiance over,”
Neely-White said. As a former principal, it was in her nature to take
control, she said.
Seneker said Neely-White and the assailant struggled for the gun, and it
went off, hitting the man once in the chest. He managed to grab the gun
from her, break a window in Neely-White’s pickup with a piece of
firewood and open the door. With the gun pointed at her, Neely-White
backed off.
Police later arrested Jorge Luis Cecenas, 30, after he allegedly
abandoned the pickup. He was charged Friday, while hospitalized with a
chest wound, with first-degree assault and other counts.
