“Don’t make me shoot you,” warned the 6-foot-1 Stewart, according to police records. “I don’t want to shoot you.”
Kuch, who stands 5-foot-9, raised his hands, asked for a light and lurched toward the homeowner. Stewart fired.
A look at stand-your-ground laws nationwide and how justifiable homicides have increased
Stewart broke down in tears when police arrived. “I could have given him a light,” he said. But he said he had felt threatened.
Police asked Stewart why he hadn’t just waited inside until officers arrived.
“I don’t know,” replied Stewart. His unwanted visitor, he said, was unarmed.
“If I had a crazy drunk guy at my door,” said Jeanann Kuch, Billy’s mother, “I’d have locked my door and called 911.”
Kuch spent five weeks in a coma. He woke with no recollection of the incident.
Before the shooting, Kuch had supported the Stand Your Ground law, his parents said. Stewart’s view of the law is not known. He did not return repeated calls, and no court ever asked, because Stewart was never brought before a judge.
Stewart was arrested that night, but Assistant State Attorney Manny Garcia concluded that his actions were “justified.”
Kuch’s bipolar disorder has worsened since the shooting, his parents said. He is working as a chef’s assistant but has had trouble getting past the trauma of what happened that August night.
“By the grace of God, our son lived, but this could happen to anyone in Florida just because you went to the wrong house,” Jeanann Kuch said.
‘To prove a negative’
In the seven years since it was enacted, the Florida law and others like it have become an effective defense for an increasing number of people who have shot others, according to state records and media reports.
Justifiable homicides in Florida have tripled, according to Florida Department of Law Enforcement data. Other states have seen similar increases, FBI statistics show.
In the five years before the law’s passage, Florida prosecutors declared “justifiable” an average of 12 killings by private citizens each year. (Most justifiable killings are committed by police officers; those cases, which have also tripled, are not included in these statistics.) But in the five years after the law passed, that number spiked to an average of 36 justifiable killings per year.
Neither the state nor Florida’s association of prosecutors declares the jump in justifiable homicides to be a direct result of the new law, but the state public defender’s association does draw that connection, as have advocacy groups opposed to Stand Your Ground laws.
The Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, a national group, argues that Stand Your Ground is not just a technical expansion of the castle doctrine, the ancient legal concept that allows property owners to defend their homes, but rather a barrier to prosecution of genuine criminals.
“It’s almost like we now have to prove a negative — that a person was not acting in self-defense, often on the basis of only one witness, the shooter,” said Steven A. Jansen, the group’s vice president.
The Tampa Bay Times has identified at least 130 cases in Florida in which shooters cited the Stand Your Ground law to defend their actions; in at least 50 of those cases, prosecutors decided against bringing any charges.
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