Let me make sure I’m sitting down for this one.
A man named Kenneth Voyles broke into a Portland granite and marble shop through a damaged garage door. He was homeless, cold, and sleep-deprived. He says he was looking for shelter. Fair enough so far. Hard times are hard times, and nobody with a soul wants someone freezing on the streets.
But here’s where the story takes a turn. While inside, Voyles also picked up a drill bag and, in his own lawsuit, admits he intended to keep it. He was trespassing. He was stealing. He says so himself, in a court filing, with his own name on it.
J. Drevet (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia CommonsAnd now he wants $10 million.
You read that right. The man who broke into someone else’s building, who admits he was there to take things that didn’t belong to him, is suing the business owner for $5 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages because that owner shot him.
Now let me be clear about something. The details of what happened inside that shop are ugly no matter how you slice them. According to the lawsuit, owner James Grant came out of a back room, threw a coffee mug and heavy tiles at Voyles, then left and came back with a gun. Voyles says Grant shot him multiple times without warning, told him “you’re going to die,” shot him in the chest at point-blank range, and then shot him again as Voyles tried to crawl back out through the garage door. If that’s how it went down, Grant went way past protecting his