When Gerald Strebendt was rear-ended on a dark stretch of the Bob Straub Parkway near Springfield, Oregon, he didn’t anticipate that the driver of the other car, David Crofut, would start shouting obscenities and making violent threats. Strebendt couldn’t have known that Crofut had been drinking and had a blood alcohol concentration of nearly twice the legal limit. Likewise, Crofut had no way of knowing that the man he had just rear-ended had once served as a Marine Corps sniper and later earned the nickname “The Finishing Machine” as a professional mixed martial arts fighter.
Two worlds collided that night on the Bob Straub Parkway, and it ended in tragedy. Wary of Crofut’s threats, Strebendt armed himself with a rifle he had in the back seat of his vehicle. Meanwhile, Crofut, drunk and probably concerned about the legal consequences of driving under the influence, didn’t respond to Strebendt’s rifle with the kind of alarm the Marine veteran expected. When Crofut reached into his pocket, Strebendt feared he was retrieving a weapon. Strebendt’s attorney, Mike Arnold, hypothesized that Crofut, who had won $500 playing video poker at the bar, was probably reaching for the cash, hoping to settle things without involving the police. Fearing an imminent attack, Strebendt shot Crofut—a single, fatal round to the head.
We’ve explored other cases where the defender and the perceived attacker entered a volatile situation with tragically mismatched perceptions. In Lesson 8, we told you about a deadly encounter at a gas station in Lapeer, Michigan, where Jeffrey Smith exchanged harsh words with Arthur Kohn during a road rage incident. Smith couldn’t have known that Kohn had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.14 and had cocaine in his system. When Smith drew his revolver and pointed it at Kohn, he probably expected it to end the argument. He didn’t anticipate Kohn would respond by attacking with a crowbar. Smith shot and killed his attacker.
In Lesson 2, we introduced you to Ted Wafer, who awoke at quarter to 4 AM, startled by loud pounding on his front door. Concerned with the escalating crime in his Dearborn Heights, Michigan, neighborhood, Wafer grabbed his Mossberg tactical shotgun. During a break in the pounding, Wafer opened the front door to investigate. To his surprise, he found himself face to face with a shadowy stranger on his doorstep. Wafer didn’t know the stranger was a 19-year-old woman named Renisha McBride. He couldn’t have known that McBride had been smoking marijuana, drinking vodka, or that she had likely struck her head in a vehicle collision with a parked car. As for McBride—injured, confused, and intoxicated—she likely thought she was at a familiar house rather than the home of an armed, crime-weary middle-aged man with a shotgun. Wafer killed McBride with a single blast to the head.
Strebendt, Smith, and Wafer each acted as if they faced sober, rational individuals who were, perhaps, acting with nefarious intent. They were wrong. Law enforcement veteran and firearms instructor John Hearne says, “You can’t assume that everybody you encounter is going to be a rational actor—like you believe yourself to be. You have crazy people. You have people who take substances. They’re not connected to reality as you or I understand it.” John’s advice: “Don’t take that invitation to step into their bizarro world.”
If Strebendt, Smith, and Wafer had considered that their aggressors were too impaired to respond rationally, they might well have made different choices. “Arguably the most important thing you can possess as a properly prepared defender is a valid mental map,” John says. “Mental maps have different names in different fields: mental representations—we call them schemas. Regardless of the field, from surgery to football, the person with the best mental map tends to win.”
For Lesson 13, we’ll explore three cases where defenders operated with an inaccurate mental map. First, we’ll return to the icy street in Rochester, Minnesota, where a fender bender ended with Alexander Weiss shooting a teenager who dared him to pull the trigger. Then we’ll travel to a remote ranch in New Mexico, where a land deal between friendly acquaintances devolved into a deadly struggle over a rifle. We’ll end in a rural Maryland neighborhood where Charles Dorsey shot and killed his neighbor’s house guest after a tragic set of misunderstandings.
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Twenty-five-year-old Alexander Weiss grew up in Pine Island, Minnesota, a small town on the prairie south of Minneapolis. As a kid, Weiss enjoyed the comfort of a close-knit, religious family, and he volunteered at church and at the YMCA. He attained the rank of Eagle Scout. As a young adult, Weiss moved to nearby Rochester and took a job with a construction contractor. On weekends, he refereed youth basketball through the Rochester Area Officials Association. Weiss lived in an apartment complex where, as he later told jurors, he often feared for his life amid constant drug activity, vandalism, and people following him to his car. After witnessing fights at the local community college, Weiss applied for a carry permit because, he said, he was “fearful of what was going on around me.” At trial, he testified that “I carry a firearm because I don’t trust I can fight.” On Sunday morning, January 14, 2018, while driving to referee a youth basketball game, Weiss had a tragic encounter with seventeen-year-old Muhammed Rahim.
Born in northern Iraq, Rahim and his family escaped the war-torn country in 2012, and they found a better life in Rochester. Rahim found a job at Chipotle and met a girlfriend, 18-year-old Natalie Greenwood. On the morning of January 14, Rahim had been out all night with his best friend, Noah Dukart, driving around Rochester in a silver Chevy Cavalier, with Greenwood and her friend Riley Bongiorno in the back seat. At 8 AM on that January morning, Rahim made a reckless turn on an icy road and crashed his car into a curb. Weiss witnessed the accident, and ever the Eagle Scout, he pulled up behind the Cavalier to make sure everyone was okay. Weiss didn’t know that Riley Bongiorno had broken her nose and suffered a concussion in the accident. He couldn’t have known that Noah Dukart had taken unprescribed Xanax, which the teen admitted at trial, made him feel like he didn’t care about anything.
When Rahim backed his car away from the curb, he didn’t realize Weiss had pulled up, and he crashed into Weiss’ Subaru. Weiss exited his vehicle to exchange insurance information. Dukart got out of the passenger side of the Cavalier to start a fight—fists balled and shoulders up. When Weiss announced he intended to call the police, Dukart became enraged and threatened to kill him. Criminal defense attorney Don West says Weiss “should have realized there was something wrong with this guy’s response. It was completely out of kilter. It was hostile.”
John Hearne described the moment as a decision point. “Have in your mind there’s an off ramp. There’s a branching decision: this is going to be a typical event, or this is going to be an atypical event,” John says. “Be prepared to deal with both contingencies.” Weiss wasn’t prepared for an atypical event. Instead of driving away and calling 9-1-1, Weiss decided to stay and engage. “I believe it’s a crime if you leave,” Weiss later told jurors. When he reached into his vehicle to get his phone, he also grabbed his pistol and slid it into his pocket before returning to confront Dukart.
By then, Rahim had also exited the Cavalier and joined his friend. Intimidated, Weiss drew the pistol and held it down and to the side. Rahim laughed and spat on him after saying, “That’s not even a real gun.” Weiss pointed the pistol at Rahim’s chest. According to Dukart, Rahim responded, “Do it then.” Weiss probably never imagined Rahim would respond to his pistol by daring him to shoot. He fired a single fatal shot. Rahim invited Weiss into his irrational bizarro world, and Weiss accepted the invitation.
“I feel bad for him that he didn’t see far enough into the future to anticipate that this thing would go really bad,” Don West says. “He probably didn’t consider that the teenagers would be knuckleheads and smart asses, taunting and mocking him.” Weiss’ mental map didn’t account for a braggadocious teenager who was probably under the influence. He found himself in uncharted territory—without the tools to navigate the unexpected challenges.
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In the winter of 2020, retired extreme skiing champion Dean Cummings traveled to a remote corner of New Mexico to start a new chapter of his life. Hoping to buy some land in the hills near Cabezon Peak, Cummings met Guillermo Arriola, who hoped to sell his sprawling ranch. To foster Cummings’ interest, Arriola agreed to let Cummings park his fifth-wheel trailer on the land while he took time to explore the property. He even lent the potential buyer a horse and allowed Cummings to use his home whenever he was away. The men struck up an apparent friendship. “We got along just fine,” Cummings later told jurors. “We seemed to have a lot in common.”
One night, over a bottle of whiskey, Arriola revealed a different side of himself. He bragged about threatening a neighbor, and he claimed to have intimidated a passerby with a hammer. Cummings found the conversation unsettling. “I had a red flag go up immediately,” he later testified. “I figured I didn’t want to be on his bad side.” But Cummings didn’t want to jeopardize the deal, so he looked past the strange behavior. By the end of February, however, contentious contract negotiations put a strain on the relationship.
On February 29, while Arriola was away, Cummings used his host’s kitchen table to scope his rifle with the intention of hunting Barbary sheep in the surrounding hills. When Cummings finished his work, he inserted a full magazine and leaned the rifle against a wall in the kitchen. Not expecting Arriola to come home for some time, Cummings left the rifle and went back to his camper—a mistake in judgment, Cummings later admitted. When Arriola came home earlier than expected, Cummings realized his mistake and went to retrieve his rifle. Instead of grabbing his rifle and leaving, Cummings instigated a conversation.
The conversation quickly turned to discussion about the problems delaying the sale. Cummings testified, “I started calling him out, saying, ‘Are you trying to scam me?’” Enraged by the accusation, according to Cummings’ testimony, Arriola attacked him, pushing him to the ground and attempting to douse him with pepper spray. As Cummings struggled to “crab walk” away from his attacker, he came within arm’s reach of his rifle. He grabbed the rifle, staggered to his feet, pointed it at Arriola, and told him to stop. At trial, Cummings explained, “I’m thinking, ‘if I point this at him, he’s going to stop and realize how serious it was,’ and he just kept barreling into me.” At that time, Cummings didn’t know his host was under the influence of alcohol and cocaine, which an expert later testified can combine in the body to form cocaethylene, a compound associated with aggressive, irrational behavior.
Cummings scrambled to escape Arriola’s attack, but quickly found himself cornered in a bedroom at the end of the hallway. “He was all over the gun,” Cummings said. “I knew it would have been the end of me if he got ahold of that gun.” By Cummings’ account, two rounds discharged into the floor during the struggle. When Cummings gained control of the rifle, he fired nine times. Three of those shots struck Arriola, killing him. Cummings was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. While a jury found Cummings not guilty on all counts, the defender spent more than two and a half years behind bars awaiting trial.
At trial, Cummings admitted that he may have gone too far by calling Arriola a “scammer.” He also told jurors that Arriola “definitely seemed intoxicated” when he came home. Objectively, Cummings brought a loaded rifle into another man’s home and started an argument with a drunk person over a contentious business negotiation, and then insulted him. Knowing his host had already confessed his propensity for violence, perhaps Cummings shouldn’t have expected Arriola to have a reasonable response. Firearms instructor Steve Moses notes that we all have the right to speak our minds, but that doesn’t absolve us from the consequences. When we provoke someone, we open ourselves to an unpredictable response. “Other people don’t think like we do,” Steve warns. “We don’t control how others will think, or feel, or react.”
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Gerardo “Gary” Espinoza and his wife, Joanne, traveled from Chantilly, Virginia, to attend an all-day pool party and stay the night with the Sweeneys—friends who had recently moved to the rural bedroom community of Woodbine, Maryland. Espinoza, a 46-year-old IT recruiter, was a father of two who had coached his kids’ sports teams. On July 20, 2019, Espinoza spent the day drinking by the Sweeneys’ new pool. At around 1 AM, Espinoza wandered away from the pool deck wearing only his swim trunks. Gary’s wife, Joanne, told reporters she suspected her husband probably went to get something from the car. When he came back to the house, he found the front door locked. So he knocked and rang the doorbell and asked his hosts to let him back in.
But Espinoza wasn’t at the Sweeneys’ house. Intoxicated and disoriented, he had mistakenly wandered to the front door of Charles and Barbara Dorsey, whose house looked much like the Sweeneys’ and partially shared their driveway. “I think he thought the house he was trying to get into was our friend’s house,” Joanne told reporters. The commotion woke the Dorseys, and when Charles scrambled to the front door and looked out the window, he saw a shirtless stranger.
The Dorseys’ Ring doorbell camera captured what happened next. Espinoza knocks, jiggles the doorknob, rings the bell, and gestures at the camera. When a voice inside asks who it is, he answers, “Gary!” Howard County State’s Attorney Rich Gibson commented on the exchange. “At first, it’s calm, and it’s jovial on the part of Mr. Espinoza,” Gibson said. “It is my belief that Mr. Espinoza thought his friends were pranking him.” But there was no joke. Barbara Dorsey called the police while Charles Dorsey guarded the front door, yelling for the stranger to leave.
The confusion compounded for 13 minutes as Espinoza left and then returned. In the final moments, Espinoza, now agitated and angry, approached the door and shouted, “I’m going to f— you up,” and “You want a piece of this s—?” He aggressively shook the door handle. When the lock failed, the door swung open, and Espinoza stepped inside. Charles Dorsey had been waiting behind the door, armed with a pistol. When Espinoza breached the threshold, Dorsey fired a single fatal shot.
After a five-week investigation, State’s Attorney Gibson announced that Dorsey would not face criminal charges. “Espinoza’s behavior seemed to indicate a desire to harm the people in the house,” Gibson said. “Espinoza did not literally mean the words he was saying at the door, but it’s equally clear there was no way for the Dorsey family to know that he did not intend exactly what he stated.” John Hearne calls the tragic shooting of Gary Espinoza “lawful but awful.”
Even though Dorsey didn’t face charges, shooting a neighbor’s houseguest over a misunderstanding is an example of what Army veteran and firearms instructor Claude Werner calls a “negative outcome.” Claude says, “The recipe for a negative outcome is not being aware, not having thought about what your decisions are ahead of time, and not having enough information.” If Dorsey had more information—had he known the angry shirtless man at his front door was his neighbor’s drunken house guest—he might have made different decisions.
The State’s Attorney excused Dorsey for not having all the information, and he noted that Dorsey didn’t break any laws. Don West says, “I don’t know that you can look at Charles Dorsey and say he did anything wrong, but we can certainly look at him and say he didn’t do everything right.” Steve Moses suggests a better alternative course for Dorsey would have been to ensure the door was secure (Dorsey had left the deadbolt unlocked) and occupy a hard corner in another room. A hard corner is a highly defensible position along the wall with the door; it allows the defender to see an attacker before the attacker sees them. John Hearne agrees. “Distance gives you time, time gives you options. So retreat to the safe room . . . because if the guy had kicked in the door, he would have probably immediately recognized this was not his buddy’s house—something’s not right.”
If you allow yourself the time and space to recognize when something is not right—to realize that you’ve wandered beyond the boundaries of your mental map—then you can stop, re-evaluate the situation, and make decisions that are more aligned with the circumstances. Charles Dorsey had 13 minutes to consider that the shirtless man who jovially introduced himself by his first name was not a depraved home invader, but he apparently never recalibrated his mental map, and it caused him to make a deadly mistake while navigating a difficult situation.
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When I present the Dorsey story to armed defenders at self-defense conferences, I sometimes get eye rolls at the suggestion that a defender might consider “retreating” to a hard corner in their home when faced with a potential intruder. Not long ago, use-of-force instructor Chuck Haggard sat in for a presentation, and when he heard audience pushback at the hard corner recommendation, he told the group about a case from his town where an autistic teenager unwittingly entered a stranger’s home. “I’d feel pretty bad if I found out I shot a special needs kid,” Chuck says. His point was well taken.
In the seconds after Dorsey shot Espinoza, Barbara Dorsey’s 9-1-1 call captured her scream. “Why did you do that?” she shouted. “He pushed the door open!” Charles replied. Barbara’s excited utterance suggests she wasn’t as convinced as her husband of the threat posed by the shirtless stranger. It’s not that she wasn’t justifiably terrified during the harrowing late-night encounter; it’s just that she seemed to sense from the unfolding circumstances that something wasn’t quite right. She viewed the event with a different lens. Perhaps she was operating with a different mental map.
Weiss, Cummings, and Dorsey each decided to engage with an irrational individual when they had opportunities to break contact and disengage before things got violent. Steve Moses often quotes the self-defense adage: “To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” It’s a colloquial way of describing what John Hearne called a schema—a mental map. For an armed defender, a mental map that accounts for the possibility that any potential aggressor might be irrational, intoxicated, mentally ill, or otherwise impaired leaves room for safer choices that don’t require a hammer.
As John says, you don’t have to step into their bizarro world. “Once you get engaged in something like that,” Steve says, “you basically surrender some power over the rest of your life to this other person.” The purpose of studying cases like these, Don West says, is “to help armed defenders build a mental map that reduces the risk that they have to predict the volatile behavior of someone else.” When you assume the aggressor is rational, you’re betting your life and your freedom on the judgment of a stranger.
