A man will be charged with manslaughter in the death of a cleaning woman who was shot through a front door after arriving to the wrong house earlier this month, a prosecutor in Indiana announced on Monday.
The man, Curt Andersen, who owned the home where the woman was shot, was charged with voluntary manslaughter. Jail records show that he was booked earlier on Monday.
The killing on Nov. 5 had alarmed the small suburb of Whitestown in Boone County, Ind., and was similar to several others in recent years elsewhere in the country in which homeowners shot people who had arrived at their houses by mistake.
The woman who was killed in Indiana, María Florinda Ríos Pérez de Velásquez, had approached the house with her husband, believing that it was one they had been hired to clean. But when two people inside heard noise at their doorstep before dawn that morning, they thought someone might be trying to break in, the police said.
They called the police, but before officers arrived, prosecutors say, Mr. Anderson fired a single gunshot through the front door of the home, fatally striking Ms. Ríos Pérez de Velásquez in the head.
Ms. Ríos Pérez de Velásquez was 32 and had immigrated with her husband from Guatemala about three years ago, according to her brother. She was the mother of four children, the youngest of whom is 1 year old.
“This is a tragedy for everyone involved,” said Kent T. Eastwood, the top prosecutor in Boone County, as he announced the charge.
He had said in an interview earlier this month that he would be closely analyzing the local police department’s investigation and noted that Indiana has strong self-defense laws that protected people in many instances.
Since the killing, Ms. Ríos Pérez de Velásquez’s family has called for charges against the shooter in interviews, on social media and on the steps of the prosecutor’s office.
“All I’m asking for is justice,” the woman’s husband, Mauricio Velásquez, said in Spanish while holding their youngest child at a demonstration last week. “We know that we’re immigrants, but we have rights because we are not animals, we are people.”
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports for The Times on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice.
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