Earl Jones is the sort of guy you don’t trifle with. He’s 92-years-old, sharp as a tack and has a John Wayne demeanor about him – as in don’t take crap off nobody.
So, it’s not surprising when he hears a commotion in his basement that sounds like someone breaking in, he doesn’t get all flustered.
He merely walked over to the corner, grabbed is trusty .22 rifle – always loaded of course, because zombies aren’t going to wait for you to load your gun – and sat and waited.
Patiently he waited with a good view of the fatal funnel. The funnel was indeed fatal for the first of the big bad wolves that kicked the door open.
He wasn’t expecting to take a .22 to the heart and probably had a couple of minutes to consider the folly of his errant ways before he bled out and lost consciousness.
Earl Jones would probably be just fine with that, because he told the local paper, “These people aren’t worth any more to me than a groundhog.”
Earl Jones doesn’t have a lot of sympathy or compassion for criminal types.
God bless him.
And nice shooting!
VERONA — Earl Jones had just turned off his new TV shortly after 2 a.m. Monday when he heard a bang in the basement.
The 92-year-old Boone County farmer walked eight paces to get his loaded .22 caliber rifle from behind the bedroom door. He unwrapped a beige cloth and returned to the living room, sitting in a chair with clear view – and shot – of the basement door, waiting with the gun across his lap.
Some 15 minutes later, when he heard footsteps moving closer up the stairs, he raised the rifle to his eye. The intruder kicked open the door. Jones fixed his aim on the center of the man’s chest and fired a single shot. The Boone County Sheriff later announced the death of the intruder, Lloyd (Adam) Maxwell, 24, of Richmond, Ky.
“These people aren’t worth any more to me than a groundhog,” Jones told the Enquirer. “They have our country in havoc. We got so many damned crooked people walking around today.”
Two men with Maxwell, Ryan Dalton, 22, and Donnie Inabnit, 20, both of Dry Ridge, were charged with second degree burglary and tampering with evidence. Police say they removed Maxwell’s body from Jones’ Violet Road home.
…Jones has lived alone since his wife, Virginia Pearl, died in 2006. The couple had no children. Jones grew up hunting squirrels in Boone County and volunteered for the forerunner to the U.S. Air Force in 1941. He went through weapons training in the military.
He is not happy that police took the rifle used in the shooting.
“How am I going to protect myself if they come back looking for revenge?” he said.
Maxwell fell back seven steps onto a landing. Jones didn’t pursue them into the basement.
He called a neighbor and calmly said, “I need help. I just shot a man,’” he said.
At the same time, the two unhurt intruders, Dalton and Inabnit, fled Jones’ property with Maxwell’s body. Not long afterward, having driven across the county line, they called Kenton County Police with a bogus story of how Maxwell had been shot.
When Boone County Sheriff’s deputies arrived at Jones house, they found the basement door ajar and no one except Jones in the home.
Jones didn’t like how deputies treated him. “They stood down there with their guns on me, yelling, `Get your hands up! Get your hands up!’” he said. “I told them, `I’m not putting my damn hands up.’”
Finally, he did. Police approached up the long gravel driveway, flanked by a field of tobacco that Jones rents to another farmer, and questioned him.
“Was I scared? Was I mad? Hell, no,” Jones said. “It was simple. That man was going to take my life. He was hunting me. I was protecting myself.”