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Last updated on Friday, May 25, 2012
(BLOOMINGTON) - About 2:30 the morning of July 19, 2009, Mario Wright awoke to intruders beating up his mother, seeking drugs or money to steal. He grabbed his handgun and ran toward them.
Laura Lane of the Herald-Times reports a .380-caliber bullet fired by one of the intruders entered his chest, but 32-year-old Wright kept after the men, shooting several times in their direction as they fled.
The burglars left the Bloomington residence empty-handed. Wright collapsed and bled to death on the front porch of a mobile home at Lot 26 in Arlington Valley Trailer Park as his girlfriend dialed 911. His last words: "two six-foot-tall black guys."
Today, both men charged with the murder are free.
"The sad reality is, sometimes that happens," Monroe County Chief Deputy Prosecutor Bob Miller said Wednesday after charges against the man suspected of firing the fatal shot were dismissed.
Marcus X. Davis, 23, had been charged with murder, attempted robbery resulting in serious injury and burglary resulting in serious injury in connection with Wright's death. But during a court hearing Wednesday, those charges were dismissed because, Miller said, there's no substantive evidence against Davis that would result in a conviction.
Davis did plead guilty Wednesday to an unrelated charge of strangulation, filed a month before Wright was killed, stemming from a fight with a girlfriend pregnant with his child. He received credit for time spent in the Monroe County Jail since his March arrest and was released; he said he intended to take a bus back to Detroit, where he is from.
Another man charged in the killing, Eric Montgomery, was acquitted of murder during a February 2010 trial after jurors deliberated 12 hours. Wright's girlfriend testified the shooter had a bandanna tied across the bottom half of his face and that she was certain it was not Montgomery.
He was charged under Indiana's felony murder law, which says a person who is present or is committing another crime when someone is killed can be charged with murder.
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