The crashing back door snapped Eric Cegon and his girlfriend awake in her apartment. Fear grew as they heard feet rapidly climbing the stairs to their barricaded bedroom door about 3:30 a.m. Wednesday. Cegon, 30, grabbed the shotgun next to their bed and sat up, hoping the locked door would hold. He said he knew the intruder was the man who had threatened his life and held a knife to his girlfriend a week earlier. The girlfriend, Samantha Simons, covered up her 2-year-old son and screamed ashe ex-boyfriend kicked in the door, knocking over the small dresser lodged against it. “I knew if that door came open what I would do,” Cegon said Thursday. He fired the 12-gauge shotgun he had borrowed from a friend two weeks before to protect himself. The blast knocked Erik A. Richter, 35, to the floor. A loaded gun fell from his hand. “You killed me,” the couple recall Richter saying. Cegon squeezed the trigger again. “I shot him again to make sure he didn’t get up,” Cegon said. “I’ll never forget the smell.” Simons, 21, said the Cegon had to do it or that Richter “would have killed us all.” His deadly break-in was the second time he had violated a court order not to contact his former girlfriend, Simons, or he new boyfriend, Cegon. Richter was scheduled to appear in court Wednesday on a terroristic threats charge for repeatedly threatening to kill Cegon since Nov. 4, when he broke Cegon’s vehicle’s windows, cour records said. Richter is the father of Simon’s son. Cegon and Simons were questioned but not arrested, said Lt. Todd Hoffman of the Wright County Sheriff’s Office. State law allows a person to defend himself or others in a home if the person believes he or she faces an imminent threat of great bodily harm or death, Kelly said. He said he will decide whether any charges are warranted against Cegon after the investigation is over and an autopsy done on Richter, who did not fire his handgun. Cegon “may very well have been justified in taking another one’s life,” Kelly said. He added that Richter told Simons that he “refused to let her go, and said if he couldn’t have her, nobody would.”
StarTribune, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., 12/14/06
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A Sonoma County homeowner shot and killed a man who smashed through a window for his house and terrified him and his wife and early Sunday, authorities said. The intruder had gotten into a fight at a party nearby and man have mistaken the home he broke into for the one where the altercation took place, said Lt. Robert Giordano of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department. The dead man was not identified by authorities, but Giordano said the homeowner, Gerlad Steckmyer, 53, first saw him just before 3 a.m. jumping on the hood of Steckmyer’s car. When Steckmyer told the man to get off, he approached the house and tried to inside while while Steckmyer calle 911. After breaking the window, the intruder crawled through the home yelling and advanced toward the bedroom where Steckmyer and his wife were. Just outside the bedroom door, Steckmyer shot the man with a handgun “fewer than six times,” Giordano said. “What the Steckmyers went through was very traumatic. It was definitely a very scary incident,” Giordano said. “I’m just glad they’re OK. I’m sorry the suspect lost his life.’
Contra Costa Times,San Francisco, Ca., 12/17/06
