http://www.gomemphis.com/mca/local_news/article/0,1426,MCA_437_1416107,00.html

No regret, says dweller who wonders why burglar did it
By Laura Coleman Noeth

September 14, 2002

He hates that he killed the man who broke a window in his front door and
tried to come in but, aside from sleeping lighter these days Jeffrey
Armstrong says he’s put the 1993 incident behind him.

Armstrong, 40, had taken the day off work that January day and had lent
his car to a friend.
Shortly after the friend left, Armstrong heard someone kick his door,
then glass breaking. He grabbed the pistol he kept under his bed and
confronted the intruder by yelling through the door.

“Get out of here,” he said he shouted. But the man ignored him and put
his hand on the inside door knob. Armstrong fired and then there was
silence.

Thinking he’d scared the man off, Armstrong called a neighbor to warn
her. She looked out the window, he said, and saw the man lying between
Armstrong’s two doors.

Armstrong never saw the man, before or after the shooting.

“I told the police to look at him,” he said.

The incident happened in the duplex where Armstrong lived at 2336 Twain
off Airways.
Armstrong moved out of it immediately, and now lives in an apartment
complex near the airport, where management personnel greet unfamiliar
cars.

Police didn’t charge him, and a grand jury later ruled the shooting to
be justified.

“I was justified, I know that,” said Armstrong, now a security guard.
But he wonders why the burglar, identified by police as Willie
Patterson, 24, would risk his life.

“I wonder why would someone risk losing their life over material things
that they could get if they got a job,” he said.

“I don’t regret anything I did,” he said. “If I hadn’t shot him and let
him get in, I could have been killed.”

When Armstrong read about the angry reaction some had to a Frayser
shooting last month in which Donnie Weathers killed intruder Otis Lee
Yarbrough, 19, he had empathy for Weathers.
The day after that incident, Weathers moved.

“I just say a prayer for him because I can imagine what he’s going
through, but I wouldn’t move away. You can’t run all your life. When
it’s your life at stake, you’d be amazed at what you can do, but I don’t
want to ever have to do it again.”

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