Lethal force usually ends with some scarring of some sort, whether it’s physical or emotional. Check out these 8 AskReddit stories of lethal force and its horrific repercussions.
1. Revenge
I shot and killed two men who broke into my home trying to hurt my wife.
She was the GM of a very large national retail chain location. There were some discrepancies in merchandise stock/missing stock and she spent a few weeks investigating and caught two employees stealing stuff and reselling it on Craigslist.
Wife had them arrested at work with stolen stock and they swore up and down how they’d “get you, bitch”. Low and behold 3 days later they kick in our front door.
I have a semi automatic shotgun (Saiga) that I keep leaning on my nightstand. Put on my glasses and walked out into the hall and there the two guys are. I didn’t recognize them or anything, but two people standing in my living room at 2am is no mistake.
Raised up and got shot them both. Cops came about 10 minutes later (how it took 10 minutes when I told 911 that I literally just killed two people)… No charges filed besides a civil case that got dropped.
If anyone has any questions, ask. Ile answer them after work tomorrow.
Edit: forgot a crucial detail. I was still in my whitey tighties when I went into the living room. Let your imagination fill that scene in.
2. PTSD
Walked in on two men raping a close friend of mine. When I went to stop them, they pulled knives.
I of course, panicked. I had only ever fought in a controlled environment (kick-boxing and BJJ) so getting in a real fight, especially one with knives, was terrifying. I didn’t end up killing either of the guys, but one of them ended up with a broken nose and a serve concussion and the other had broken ribs and a collapsed lung. I had deep lacerations on my hands from grappling one of the knives away.
After the fight was over, I grabbed my friend and carried her out to my car. Drove to the hospital, got both of us treated, and checked her in for overnight. She had been roofied and needed to flush the drugs out of her system. I was starting to go into shock and chose to spend some time alone.
All in all, I ended up with PTSD and have issues using any sort of large amounts of force outside of workouts and sparring, and my friend killed herself a few months after the event.
3. Just a drunk?
When I was in college, 21 or 22, someone began ringing my apartment doorbell at 3 or 4 am. At first I ignored it, thinking they would just go away. The ringing stopped for a minute then continued. After I didn’t answer, they began to attempt to kick in the door.
Cue me springing out of bed and grabbing my shotgun. As i head to the living room, I’m shoving goose loads into the magazine. As I make it to the living room, the door is visibly moving inward with each kick.
I shout at the top of my voice “I have a shotgun, and I will shoot you if you make it through that door!” The kicking instantly stops.
I dial 911, the cops arrive and have the 911 operator notify me of their presence and that the outside is secure. I go outside to find two cops who, despite the fact that the steel door is visibly dented and the door frame is damaged, tell me it was “probably just a drunk”.
I guess I’ll never know. We had some instances of people forcing their way into apartments and robbing tenants at gunpoint in the area at the time, and they would ring the doorbell and get them to open the door.
Either way, I’m very thankful they didn’t make it through the door, because I have no doubt what I would have had to do, and how that would have forever impacted me. I’ll never forget the way the door looked as it moved and bowed in with each kick.
4. Canine Encounter
Smacked a dog on the side of its head with a old rusty paint roller lying on the ground.
I was in Indonesia on holiday and if you’ve been there, you’d know that certain parts are infested with stray dogs. The house I was staying in was in a somewhat ‘shady’ neighborhood. I was walking down the road outside with my cousin to meet a friend when two dogs look right at me. I stop moving because I thought they’d just move on but no.
The dogs ran at us. My cousin went the other way down the road while I sprinted another way, I felt my chest dying so I grabbed a rusty paint roller with a sharp end that was lying on the road and smacked the dog with it.
5. Sexual Preference
Being gay in America is not always fun. I got jumped in the parking lot by some college classmates who knew I was gay. I was probably 20ish.
I had a feeling the goal was to beat me to an inch of my life. One guy wrapped his arm around my throat and picked me up. He dropped me when I turned blue.
Fight or flight kicked in. I took the pocket knife out of my pocket. In a split second I flip it open, turn around, jump up, and stab him in the shoulder.
The men around him screamed. He screamed and tried to get me off him. I hung on screaming moving the knife around in his arm. He managed to pull me off.
There was a lot of blood. He lived and they never tired to attack me again.
6. “Wasn’t bluffing”
Didnt happen to me but a close friend. He was engaged to a woman with a shady past and a young child from a previous relationship. She cleaned up and was given full custody as the father could barely care for himself let alone a small child. One night he shows up high as hell at around 2 am, broke in, and was trying to take the child armed with a knife. I believe he thought the woman was alone. my friend came out of the side room with a gun and told him to set the infant down or he would shoot. He refused the offer and my friend wasnt bluffing. Shot him in the head. They felt that if he made it out of the house with the child they would never see either of them again. He doesnt talk about the incident and only told me the one time. He told me he doesnt regret it at all. He said he would never be able to live with himself if something happened to the kid which he considers his daughter
7. Bartender
I’ve posted this one before, but here is it again.
I was tending bar, and one of the customers was hitting on me. Pretty typical Friday night. But this guy was off. First off, he was coming on super strong, like, most guys would flirt, I’d bring them their drinks, and they’d go into their little cliques and leave me alone. This guy came in alone and was aggressively, almost violently hitting on me. He was also just, in some way I still cannot quantify, fundamentally off. He seemed like the type of guy animals would avoid for seemingly no reason.
Anyway, I make sure the patrons are topped off before I go out for a smoke break. About five minutes later, the creepy guy comes out, and I’m about to tell him that it’s employees only back there. He puts his finger to his lips, and for some stupid fucking reason this stops me from saying a word. He grabs the front of my top, and pulls it and my bra down. He puts his hands on my waist, and is kind of pulling me towards him and trying to pull my skirt down. I pull a knife out of my boot, grab his head with my other hand, pull it down, and draw the knife across his throat.
The look in his eyes is what gets me still. To me, they said “why’d you do that? I was only playing.” I definitely remember the blood. I had severed his carotid, so, I was covered in it. I call one of the regulars on my cell, and he comes out. One of his biker buddies throws his coat around me, and his girlfriend, for some reason, had a change of clothes, so I changed into them while someone called the cops. This girl was a lot smaller (I’m 6’1″) and I remember feeling worried about how ridiculous I would look for the cops.
I was found to be acting in self-defense. I am still super glad the manager installed CCTV cameras that caught the whole thing. I honestly believe that’s what saved the case.
How I felt about it. That’s a difficult question. I regret that he put me into a position where I felt that I had to kill him. I do not, in any sense of the word, regret killing him. I certainly didn’t enjoy it, but placed in the same circumstances a thousand times, I would do it a thousand times more.
8. Escalated
When I was 17 I was in an alleyway with my then-girlfriend (Sophie). We were young and had recently purchased some weed and wanted it to smoke for the first time together. As we were sitting there getting out the materials, a homeless guy starts walking towards us and starts talking to us. He seemed harmless at first and was holding pretty normal conversation, but that changed quickly. He asked how old I was and when I said 17, he said he didn’t believe me. He then asked my girlfriend and she said 16 and this somehow angered him even more. He started yelling in my face calling me a fucking liar. He grabbed my shirt and start getting really physical (trying to punch me and push me against the wall). He was just in full rage mode and I had no idea if he could have a knife or worse. I pushed Sophie to the side and told her to run and I don’t really know what happened exactly but I panicked and grabbed his arms and kinda pushed/punched him away from me as hard as I could. He fell backwards, tripped on the sidewalk and hit his head super hard on the ground. From what I could tell, he was completely unconscious. Sophie had been gone a few minutes at this point and managed to find a Cop and they all came back to me. There was a little blood starting to pool on the ground (around his head). Ambulances arrived pretty quickly and transported him to a hospital and I felt fucking terrible. Trembling, sweating, guilty. It was just such a shitty situation. I never meant harm to anyone. The guy didn’t die, but apparently he would have if ambulances had arrived any later, he lost a lot of blood. As for me, we were lucky to find a CCTV camera in the alley that showed the incident. I was never charged with anything. I felt really bad for a long time. And for a long time I avoided going downtown/hanging out in my old spots. I don’t know, I kinda became a recluse because I became scared of something like that happening again. That was 7 years ago. I don’t really think about it anymore. It was a terrible situation that I hope to never be in again, but if it were to happen again, I’d probably have the same reaction. If I have any advice, just stay away from sketchy places. You have no idea who frequents them, and being in a foreign/unfamiliar place is usually just recipe for disaster. I should have never been there in the first place.
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