COVINGTON, Ky. – There will be no charges in the case of a woman who shot two men breaking into her Covington house, police said Friday.
The shooting occurred at a house in the 2500 block of Warren Street Feb. 2. Police said Charlene Dietz, 61, shot two intruders in her home.
However, the men weren’t burglars. They were Michael Miller, 34, and Jonathan Lovell, also 34. Deputies had evicted Miller from the house earlier that day for Dietz and her husband, Melvin Dietz. The men returned to the house to move some of Miller’s stuff that he’d left there.
When the men arrived, they found that the locks had already been changed. Miller removed a piece of wood from the door so he could unlock it. Then he and Lovell walked inside, when Dietz shot then, hitting Miller in the leg and Lovell in the shoulder.
Police said both men were expected to survive.
Dietz told detectives that she “feared the men were there to do harm to her and her husband,” police said.
The different people involved had different stories of exactly how the shooting happened. However, police said Dietz was entitled to immunity under Kentucky’s “Castle Doctrine,” which protects someone who has “a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm.”
Miller and Lovell were also in the clear because the witnesses and evidence suggested that Miller was there to remove his own property, not steal something else.
