Stumbling into the wrong house appears to be a common behavior among drunks.
Story from “This is True” by Randy Cassingham, with his “tagline:”
“FREAKS OF NOMENCLATURE, BILATERAL DIVISION: Two weeks after graduating from the University of Colorado, a 21-year-old student allegedly went into someone else’s Boulder house at 3:30 in the morning. When the shadowy figure entered the bedroom, the homeowner yelled at the intruder to get out — and he had a gun. When the figure came closer, the homeowner fired a shot, and the intruder dropped. Zoey Ripple, 21, police say, had a blood-alcohol level of ‘above’ 0.2 percent; she was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to her hip. The homeowner will not be charged, police say, as Timothy Justice was acting in self defense. Ripple will be, though: felony criminal trespass. She likely won’t see jail time. ‘We see this pretty frequently,’ said District Attorney Stan Garnett, and the goal of prosecutors is for the court ‘to help the person get the treatment they need for their drinking.’ (RC/Denver Post) …After the trespass: just one shot. Before the trespass: way too many shots.”
The DA’s comment, “We see this pretty frequently,” seems shocking. I run across many stories in which drunks enter someone else’s home thinking it’s their own, but not even I’d have dreamt it was that common. Although in this case the alcoholic got lucky, there are countless ways for alcoholics to kill and be killed (alcoholism is the third most prevalent cause of death in adults under 59 throughout the world) and now we can add one more possible cause of death that even the most creative writers of fiction could never have thought of—if it weren’t all too real.
(Story and tagline from “This is True,” copyright 2012 by Randy Cassingham, used with permission. If you haven’t already subscribed to his newsletter—the free one at least, or the paid one I get, with more than twice the stories—I highly recommend it: www.ThisIsTrue.com.)