A Florida resident will not face criminal charges after a 15-year-old searching for his missing cellphone was fatally shot during an encounter outside the man’s Tampa home.<\/p>\n
The teen and two friends had used tracking technology to narrow the phone’s location to a gated community in the 13000 block of River Willow Place on Sept. 20, according to the Tampa Police Department<\/a>.<\/p>\n Their search eventually took them from door to door and then into the enclosed back patio of one residence, where police determined they began banging on a sliding glass door. The resident, a man in his mid-20s, armed himself and put on a mask before confronting them.<\/p>\n What happened next ended with the teen dead from a single gunshot and later became the central question in the criminal investigation: whether prosecutors could disprove the resident’s assertion that he fired while fearing for his life.<\/p>\n Following The Signal<\/p>\n The teen realized earlier that day that he had lost his phone after leaving a local establishment. He and two friends later used the phone’s tracking feature, which pointed them toward the River Willow Place area.<\/p>\n They entered the gated community through an open gate and initially left their truck in the roadway. After a community member asked them to move it, they complied and began knocking on doors to ask whether anyone had found the phone.<\/p>\n Police said the group received no response at the front door of the eventual shooter’s residence.<\/p>\n Instead of leaving, they went around to the backyard, entered an enclosed patio and began banging on the sliding glass door.<\/p>\n The resident later told police he saw people on his private patio appearing to try to access the door. He put on a mask and grabbed a firearm because he intended to scare them away.<\/p>\n The Encounter<\/p>\n Police said the other teens began running away, but the 15-year-old and resident became involved in a physical altercation just outside the enclosed patio.<\/p>\n According to the resident’s account, the teen placed him in a headlock during the struggle. He told police he feared for his life, at which point a single round was discharged and struck the teen.<\/p>\n Officers arriving at the community found the teenager critically injured and immediately began life-saving measures. He died at the scene.<\/p>\n Police secured the firearm as evidence and said the resident cooperated fully with the investigation.<\/p>\n The missing phone was not found inside the man’s residence and had not been recovered when police announced the investigation’s conclusion.<\/p>\n A Different Account<\/p>\n Police did not publicly identify the teenager in their Oct. 1 release. His family identified him to the Tampa Bay Times<\/a> as 15-year-old Heitor Amaral.<\/p>\n A different account of the final moments has also emerged from the family of one of the teens who was there.<\/p>\n Yessenia Gonzalez, whose 16-year-old son was with Amaral, told the New York Post<\/a> that her son disputed the claim that a fight occurred before the shooting.<\/p>\n Gonzalez said her son maintained that the teens were running away and were unarmed.<\/p>\n That account conflicts with the sequence Tampa Police said was established through its investigation, which found evidence that a physical altercation occurred after the other teens fled.<\/p>\n No Charges<\/p>\n Tampa Police presented the completed investigation to the State Attorney’s Office for review.<\/p>\n Prosecutors determined the evidence did not support filing criminal charges because they would be unable to successfully refute the resident’s claim of self-defense under Florida Statute 776.012(2)<\/a>.<\/p>\n The statute permits deadly force when a person reasonably believes it is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm, or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony.<\/p>\n The charging decision does not establish that every statement made by the resident was independently proven. It means prosecutors determined the available evidence would not allow them to successfully disprove the self-defense claim required for a criminal case.<\/p>\n Tampa Police closed its investigation with no criminal charges filed against the resident. Amaral’s missing cellphone had still not been recovered.<\/p>\n If you want more stories like this, follow Guessing Headlights<\/a> on <\/a>Yahoo<\/a> so you don’t miss what’s coming next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Florida resident will not face criminal charges after a 15-year-old searching for his missing cellphone was fatally…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":419196,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-419195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/419196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}