Donald Gibbs was fast asleep in his Indianapolis home early Sunday morning when he was jolted awake by the sound of gunshots. Seconds later, his son knocked on the bedroom door and alerted Gibbs to three men who were trying to break into the home. Gibbs’ son had exchanged several shots with the men as they attempted to bust through the back door, and managed to keep them from getting inside.
”A busted door jamb where they kept trying to kick it in,” said Gibbs as he surveyed the damage. “It held long enough to hold ‘em back. But I got bullet holes to the windows and the door window and to the door itself and the wall inside.”
Gibbs said his son told him that he traded gunfire with a man in the backyard.
“I see the intruder laying here on the ground, and he wanted me to make a call for him, and ‘You know me, you know me,’” Gibbs said of what the wounded man told him. “You don’t come knocking in somebody’s back door … and he lost his gun on this side of the ground over by the fire pit, and he was laying there in the weeds there.”
As it turns out, Gibbs did know the masked man who lay injured in his yard, though not well. 24-year-old Matthew Kinniard II is Gibbs’s cousin; the son of one of his nephews. The homeowner says after he alerted authorities, he made the call that Kinniard had requested.
”I used my phone to call 911 to get somebody out here, the ambulance for him and stuff, and I even made a call to his grandmother with my phone and lift up the speaker so he could talk and his girlfriend,” said Gibbs. “If I seen him walking down the street, I couldn’t have told you who he was. That’s how often I been around him.
”I don’t really wish the worst on anybody, but I have no sympathy for anybody doing that. You don’t do that to family. It shouldn’t even be heard of, you know.”
Gibbs told FOX 59 that there was nothing in his home worth stealing, but he suspects his cousin ”thought he could hit a lick here”. Instead, he ended up taking a bullet, and at last report was still hospitalized from the injuries he sustained in the attempted home invasion.
Neither Gibbs nor his son were injured in their encounter with the three armed men, two of whom were able to flee the scene. Police haven’t said if they know the identities of the two suspects not in custody, but so far authorities haven’t released any information about the pair.
Gibbs says his son was questioned by detectives at the scene but was released after being interviewed. Based on his description of the events, it sounds like the younger man was completely justified in using deadly force to prevent the armed intruders from entering his home, and I’d be surprised if authorities decide to charge him. Kinniard, on the other hand, can expect a laundry list of charges once he’s released from the hospital.
The next family reunion might be a little awkward, but at least the Gibbs’ will be alive and able to attend, which might not have been the case if Gibbs’ son wasn’t able to get to a gun and use it to defend the family home from a shirttail relative and his accomplices.
