911 Operator to 18-Year-Old: Protect Your Baby

So Sarah McKinley shoots, kills armed home intruder
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 5, 2012 9:00 AM CST

When two men started breaking into her Oklahoma mobile home on New Year's Eve, 18-year-old widow and new mom Sarah McKinley blocked the door with a couch, grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun and a pistol, and asked the 911 dispatcher, "Is it OK to shoot him if he comes in this door?" The dispatcher stopped short of giving McKinley permission, but said, "You have to do what you have to do to protect your baby." After 21 minutes, 24-year-old Justin Shane Martin made it inside, brandishing a 12-inch hunting knife, and McKinley promptly shot and killed him. She will not be charged since she was acting in self-defense, prosecutors say, but Martin's alleged accomplice—who fled after hearing the gunshot and later turned himself in—does face a first-degree murder charge.

The two men were high on prescription painkillers and police say they may have been looking for more in McKinley's home, because they knew her husband had recently died from lung cancer. However, NewsOK paints an even more disturbing picture, noting that McKinley feared she was being watched for weeks, that someone may even have been entering her home, and that her dogs may have been poisoned in the days after her husband entered the hospital. She'd had previous run-ins with Martin: Her mother says he had followed her at a rodeo two years ago, and she had also run into him at a convenience store recently, CBS News reports. He showed up at her house the week before the break-in, on the day of her husband's funeral, ABC News adds, but McKinley did not let him in. (More shooting stories.)

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