Man who shot at lost black teenager arrested
Michigan sheriff says boy, 14, lucky that irate homeowner handled gun poorly
Brennan Walker, 14, of Rochester Hills, Mich., woke up around 7:30 a.m. on Thursday — too late. He had slept through his alarm and was going to miss the school bus.
So he decided to walk to Rochester High School, where he is a freshman. That takes about an hour and a half, but he thought he would at least make it in time for his third-period class in world studies, his favorite subject. Brennan did not have his smartphone that morning and so, lacking assistance from GPS, he tried to follow the route his bus usually takes. He ended up in a quiet subdivision where the roads looped into each other, and when he had gone in a circle, he stopped to ask for help.
He tried one home, and then another. A woman answered the door, he said, and began yelling almost immediately, as if he were trying to break in to her house.
“She didn’t really give me a chance to speak a lot, and I was trying to tell her that I go to Rochester High and I was looking for directions,” Brennan said Friday. “A few moments later the guy came downstairs, and he grabbed the shotgun.”
Brennan ran. The man followed briefly, walking out of his house and stepping off his porch, according to home security camera footage reviewed by officials. He fired a single shot with a 12-gauge shotgun, but Brennan was not hit. The teenager kept running. A few minutes later, he encountered deputies — the woman at the home had called the authorities — and told his story.
“It’s disgusting, it’s disturbing and it’s unacceptable on every level,” Sheriff Michael Bouchard of Oakland County said. On Friday, the man, Jeffery Zeigler, 53, was charged with assault with intent to murder and possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony, officials said.
The security footage suggested that Zeigler was “not terribly weapons-competent,” Bouchard said. “He was slower to discharge the weapon and, as a result, allowed this young man, thankfully, to get farther away.”
Zeigler, a retired firefighter, told a District Court judge on Friday that he was in bed Thursday morning when his wife began “screaming and crying,” the Associated Press reported. “There’s a lot more to the story than what’s being told,” he added, “and I believe that will come out in court.”