LA’s KNX1070 had this interesting interpretation of a fatal shooting in Bellflower, California. If the two men had been attempting to steal the old guy’s Lexus, would this incident have highlighted the hazards of owning a luxury car?

Shooting Highlights Hazards of Growing Medical Marijuana

LOS ANGELES, CA (CNS) — Medical marijuana activists plan to demonstrate against recent federal raids at Los Angeles-area dispensaries, while sheriff’s deputies investigate the death of a 15-year-old boy allegedly shot by a cancer patient while supposedly trying to steal some pot the man was growing in a shed behind his Bellflower home.

Jerry Cress, 57, who lives in the 8500 block of Park Street, told sheriff’s deputies he confronted two young men on his property about 6:25 a.m. yesterday and shot at one who was carrying a hammer, according to deputies with the Sheriff’s Headquarters Bureau.

Jacob T. Walker of Paramount later turned up at a hospital with an apparently fatal wound, and detectives tied him to the confrontation in Bellflower, deputies said.

Detectives then arrested Cress on suspicion of murder, along with Walker’s brother or half-brother, 24-year-old Duane Berry, who allegedly had been with Walker when he was shot, deputies said. Under California law, accomplices to a crime can be charged with murder if someone dies while that crime is in progress.

Cress, who supposedly has Stage 3 liver cancer, had about 15 pot plants growing in the shed, KCAL reported, though sheriff’s deputies would not confirm that. Cress apparently told deputies he fired at the trespasser with a pellet gun. Berry, however, told authorities he and his brother were simply walking by the shed when Cress shot at them, Channel 9 reported.

Neighbors told television station reporters that Cress, who has razor wire ringing his back yard, had complained about being burglarized before.
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The real lesson here is that it is hazardous to break into a man’s barbed-wire fortified house in order to steal from him.