Terry Duane Turner claims he acted in self-defense but police say victim Adil Dghoughi was unarmed.
Terry Duane Turner faces a murder charge after shooting a man who was parked in his driveway (Caldwell County Sheriff's Office)
A Texas man is facing a first-degree murder charge after fatally shooting a motorist he found parked in his driveway in the middle of the night.
Terry Duane Turner, 65, was arrested Friday and charged with murdering 31-year-old Adil Dghoughi, the Caldwell County Sheriff’s Office said in a press release.
The arrest comes nearly two weeks after Dghoughi was found in his car with a gunshot wound in Martindale, a small town some 35 miles south of Austin, at around 3:30 a.m. on October 11. The Moroccan national was later pronounced dead at hospital.
Turner told police that he woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and noticed an unfamiliar car parked in his driveway next to his truck with its headlights off, according to an affidavit obtained by local station KXAN.
The homeowner said that he fetched his handgun and ran outside to find the strange car’s headlights now on as it “began to rapidly accelerate in reverse,” the affidavit states.
He told investigators that he chased after the moving vehicle and “struck the front driver’s side door window twice with his handgun” before firing his weapon at the driver.
Turner then called 911, telling the dispatcher “I just killed a guy … tried to pull a gun at me, I shot.”
Investigators did not find a gun in Dghoughi’s car.
Dghoughi, who immigrated to the U.S. from Morocco in 2013, had no connection to Turner, according to the victim’s family.
His brother Othmane Dghoughi told KXAN last week that he thinks Adil lost his way that night while driving back from his girlfriend’s home in nearby Maxwell.
The family have spoken publicly of their fears that Turner may try to avoid charges by seizing on Texas’s “stand your ground” law, which allows a person to use force in self-defense if they “reasonably believe the force is immediately necessary” for their own protection.
However, family attorney Mehdi Cherkaoui said that he fails to see any “element of reasonable necessity” in the case.
“There are 1000 ways the defendant could have handled the situation. One of which was to simply call the police department. Martindale is a small community. He could have called 911, a police officer would have been at his door in minutes,” Cherkaoui told KXAN.
A fundraiser set up for Dghoughi’s funeral expenses had raised more than $46,000 towards its $60,000 goal as of Tuesday morning.
Turner was released on Friday after posting bail, online records show.
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