A black boy who missed his school bus and stopped to ask for help, almost died after a neighbor shot at him.
Fox2 reports that 14-year-old Brennan Walker says he woke up late for school and started to walk along the road to get to Rochester High School. He says he didn’t have his phone because his mom took it away but decided to stop at a house to ask for directions.
What happened next shocked the teen and his family and almost cost him his life.
“I got to the house, and I knocked on the lady’s door. Then she started yelling at me and she was like, ‘Why are you trying to break into my house?’ I was trying to explain to her that I was trying to get directions to Rochester High. And she kept yelling at me. Then the guy came downstairs, and he grabbed the gun, I saw it and started to run. And that’s when I heard the gunshot,” he says.
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Walker ran and hid and cried after the frightening ordeal.
“My mom says that, black boys get shot because sometimes they don’t look their age, and I don’t look my age. I’m 14; but I don’t look 14. I’m kind of happy that, like, I didn’t become a statistic,” he says.
The couple who shot at Brennan Walker were taken into custody by the Oakland County Sheriff Deputies.
“I found out later the only reason [the man] missed is because he forgot to take the safety off,” says Brennan Walker’s mother, Lisa Wright.
The whole ordeal with Brennan Walker was caught on the couple’s Ring.com doorbell.
“One of the things that stands out, that probably angers me the most is, while I was watching the tape, you can hear the wife say, ‘Why did “these people” choose my house?'” she says, before taking a long pause. “Who are, “these people?” And that set me off. I didn’t want to believe it was what it appeared to look like. When I heard her say that, it was like, but it is [what it looks like].”
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Wright says she was at work when she found out and rushed to be by her son’s side. Her husband is in the military and deployed in Syria.
“We should not have to live in a society where we have to fend for ourselves. If I have a question, I should be able to turn to my village and knock on a door and ask a question. I shouldn’t be fearful of a child, let alone a skin tone,” she adds. “This is a decent neighborhood. If anything—why would I knock on your door to rob you?”
“It is just absurd that this happened,” says Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard. “I feel terrible for the young man; I feel terrible for the mom and the anxiety that they had to go through. We are going to ask for every charge permissible for this guy, who stepped up and fired a shotgun because someone knocked on his door.”
The man who shot at Brennan Walker is reportedly a 53-year-old retired Detroit firefighter and is being held in the Oakland County Jail. Arraignment is expected today.