Man charged in Valparaiso apartment shooting
A Valparaiso man has been charged with three felonies in a shooting this week that injured a relative and her boyfriend, according to court documents.
Joseph Scott, 19, of the 600 block of Glendale Boulevard, faces charges of aggravated battery, a level 3 felony; battery with a deadly weapon, a level 5 felony; and criminal recklessness, also a level 5 felony.
He is being held at Porter County Jail, with an initial hearing scheduled for 9 a.m. Monday before Porter Superior Court Judge Roger Bradford.
Scott formally was charged Thursday afternoon in the shooting, which occurred Wednesday morning at the apartment complex where he lived.
According to court documents, when police arrived at the scene, they saw a man with an abdominal injury and blood-soaked clothing near a black Dodge Ram in the parking lot south of the apartment complex. The victim pointed to the corner of the parking lot, near a white Toyota Camry, and police saw Scott with a pistol in his hand.
Police ordered Scott to set the pistol down on the roof of the car and ordered him away from the passenger seat, where someone was sitting and had their legs out of the vehicle.
Police ordered the passenger to get out of the vehicle but Scott told them the woman in the passenger seat had been shot and Scott told police he believed the man may have a weapon.
The woman, who police said in charging documents also had been shot in the abdomen, told police she was being beaten by the man and Scott, her relative, had shot her.
The man told police that “nothing warrants this,” and said Scott just shot him in the back while he was standing up. He claimed he never had a weapon, according to court documents.
The woman told police she and the man, who were in a relationship, got into an argument in her bedroom at the apartment complex because she discovered he was cheating on her.
The man, she told police, grabbed a laptop cord and raised it like he was going to hit her.
The woman, who noted the bedroom door was open, said Scott entered the room “and she heard gunshots and couldn’t recall much of what happened next.”
She told police she didn’t know who was shot first and added that both Scott and the man had weapons.
Scott, transported to the Valparaiso Police Department for questioning, told police he was in a separate room in the apartment when the woman and her boyfriend got into a verbal argument in the woman’s bedroom. He told police he heard the man say, “See, now you need your (expletive) whooped.”
Scott, according to court documents, told police he grabbed his firearm, a Glock 22 40caliber pistol, and approached the man, shooting him once in the back from less than five feet away and telling him to get out of the apartment, as well as pistolwhipping him.
The man left the apartment and Scott put the pistol in his bedroom and tended to the woman, who he realized had been shot. He decided to transport her to the hospital, the retrieved his gun again and switched out magazines, court documents said.
Police were dispatched to the scene to assist medics at 7:15 a.m. Wednesday, police said.
Capt. Joe Hall, public information officer for the Valparaiso Police Department, called the shooting “an isolated incident” Wednesday.
The man, 38, who was transported to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Illinois, was upgraded stable condition and the woman, 40, who was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center, also is in stable condition, Hall said.
Though the facility and its parking lot were roped off with yellow crime scene tape Wednesday morning, Hall has said the nearby Family House, a social service agency that assists in parent visitation, was not part of the crime scene.
No one was at the facility at the time of the shooting.