A house cleaner was shot and killed after approaching the wrong home in an Indianapolis suburb.
Rios Perez’s husband, Mauricio Velázquez, was standing beside his wife at the front door Wednesday morning when she was shot. They had been cleaning homes together for seven months, Velázquez told WRTV in Indianapolis.
According to police, officers responded to a 911 call at 6:49 a.m. Wednesday reporting a “possible” residential entry in progress. When they arrived, they found Rios Perez with a gunshot wound and an adult male on the front porch. Rios Perez was pronounced dead at the scene.
The shooting has thrust Indiana’s castle doctrine laws into the spotlight. These statutes allow homeowners to use reasonable force, which includes deadly force, to stop what they reasonably believe is an unlawful entry into their home. Thirty-one states have similar protections on the books, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Boone County Prosecutor Kent Eastwood said Friday that the decision on whether to file charges will not come easily. “You need to understand all the details so you can understand what happened and what is reasonable,” Eastwood said. “One of the hardest things today in this world is to agree on what’s reasonable. As a prosecutor, those are things we have to grapple with.”
Eastwood said he will carefully review investigators’ findings, examining “every second” of witnesses’ recorded interviews and doorbell camera footage to piece together the moments leading up to the shooting.
Rios Perez leaves behind four children—her oldest 17 years old and her youngest 11 months old.
“I’m raising funds to send her body back to her country of origin. We also need help finding and hiring a lawyer so that whoever did this to my sister is held accountable. It’s not fair that they took the life of a mother of four, leaving her children orphaned. We want justice, from the bottom of our hearts,” Rudy Rios wrote in the fundraiser, which has raised $57,000 of an $80,000 goal.
