There was a man in the Orlando area by the name of Henry Brown. He and his wife had separated, and he began stalking her. He put a GPS tracking device on her car. He threatened her. She went to court and got a domestic violence restraining order.
He followed her constantly. On at least two occasions, he was caught by a Deputy violating the restraining order, but the Deputy and prosecutors chose to do nothing about it. Officials said there were constant injunction violations from January to April, which went unreported, based on interviews with family and friends after the murders.
Officials said Henry Brown's phone records show he tried to contact Chericia Brown via text and email and used fake phone numbers and emails to conceal his identity.
What happened next was a travesty. He found his wife's car at a Chili's restaurant, and hid in the trunk of her car as he waited for her to exit the eatery. Once she came out of the establishment, he confronted her and stabbed her multiple times before fleeing. Two bystanders, one a nurse and the other a paramedic, tried to render aid to the woman. That is when Brown returned in his pickup truck and
ran all three of them over.
All three were injured, two of them seriously. The wife was taken to Central Florida Regional Hospital, where she died of her injuries. In the interim, the suspect
went to the babysitter's house, picked up the couple's two children, and went to the hospital in search of his wife. Deputies who were there recognized him, and this is what happened next:
Brown escaped in his truck and was found a short time later. A police chase ensued, which ended when stop sticks were employed. When police approached the vehicle, they found him with his one and four year old children, all three of them dead from gunshot wounds.
My thoughts:
1. To people with an anti gun agenda, the paramedic, the nurse, and the wife's injuries and death do not count, because they were not related to guns. He used a knife and a pickup truck as his weapons. We see this often in the anti gun community, where they trot out the metric of "gun death" to claim that countries who outlaw guns see a decline in "gun death" but the ignore the fact that murder rates either remain unchanged or actually rise after strict gun laws are passed, thus proving that only "gun deaths" count.
2. A judge in Seminole county issued a domestic violence restraining order. It did no good whatsoever. These orders do nothing to prevent domestic violence, and are only used to
persecute the innocent in messy breakups, mainly by women against men. The truly violent people simply ignore them. In this case, the judge who granted the order
said this:
In this instance, the judge did everything in her power to enjoin Mr. Brown from having contact with his spouse, and yet he did. These deaths are tragedies that a piece of paper could not prevent.
Even the judge concedes that a DV order doesn't prevent this kind of violence.
3. Since he was under a Domestic Violence Restraining order, it was against both Federal and State law for him to be in possession of a firearm or ammunition. It was against the law for him to hide in his wife's trunk, and it was against the law for him to try to kill her, their children, the bystanders who came to his wife's aid, as well as the people who were at the hospital. In all, Brown violated the law no fewer than 27 times that day, with at least 14 of those violations being felonies. None of those laws mattered, and passing yet another law would not have prevented this, or even changed the outcome in a meaningful way.
There were a
host of errors that led to this disaster. There were dozens of times where people could have reported what was going on and prevented this, but chose not to. The people who did report crimes were ignored.
In the end, the only one to blame for this was the evil man who changed a dozen lives, and ended three of them, besides his own. Some people are just evil. That is why I choose to carry a weapon for the defense of myself and the people I care about.
