Three teenagers returning an airsoft gun to a sporting goods store were accosted by a gun-waving vigilante. The teens repeatedly told him the gun was a toy, and dropped it when he ordered them to. He killed one of them anyway, then lied to police to make it appear he acted in self-defense.
The incident happened in Renton, Washington, on June 5, 2024. The vigilante, Aaron Brown Myers, 51, was arrested and is charged with second-degree murder (read story here).
Myers, a security guard, had just gotten off work and was hanging around in the parking lot while his son attended a martial arts class next door. He told the cops he was keeping “overwatch” over the parking lot because crimes were committed there. Seeing the teens, he jumped to the conclusion they were robbing the store, and deemed it his “duty to intervene.”
This wasn’t the first time Myers did something like that. According to a Seattle TV station, “In March of 2022, Myers followed a person carrying a metal object he thought was a gun from one store to another. He did this, prosecutors wrote in charging documents, because he believed he ‘may need to intervene’ and he ‘might have to shoot’ that person” (see story here). That person may be lucky to be alive. Now that an innocent kid is dead, it’s up to prosecutors to keep this loose cannon from doing it again.
Photo below: The crime scene where the teenager was shot
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