The sun hadn’t yet risen when the gunshot rang out. A single shot, fired from inside a three-bedroom home in suburban Indianapolis on Wednesday, pierced the front door and fatally struck a house cleaner who had arrived at the porch moments earlier with her husband.
The police in Whitestown, Ind., the small but growing town where the shooting took place, said that two residents had been inside the home that morning when the cleaners arrived. The residents believed their home was possibly being broken into and called 911. In the five minutes between the call and when the police arrived, one of the residents fired from inside the home and struck the woman in the head, officials said.
Detectives are now trying to track down exactly what happened, and prosecutors are preparing to review whether to file charges.
The woman who was killed, María Florinda Ríos Pérez de Velásquez, 32, was a mother of four children and had immigrated with her husband to the United States from Guatemala about three years ago, according to her brother, Rudy Ríos Pérez.
The police have not identified the shooter nor provided any description.
The home where the shooting took place is part of a new development in Whitestown, which is named after Albert S. White, a former U.S. senator and railroad executive in Indiana with ties to President Abraham Lincoln. The house was sold in 2021 to a man who the police indicated was one of the residents inside the home on Wednesday. He could not be reached for comment on Thursday.
The shooting mirrors several others in recent years in which people who arrived at a wrong address were met with gunfire by homeowners worried they were under threat.
In 2023, a man in his 80s in Kansas City, Mo., shot and wounded a teenager, Ralph Yarl, who had rung the doorbell at his house, believing it was someone else’s. Two days later in rural upstate New York, a man killed a 20-year-old woman after firing a shotgun at two cars and a motorcycle that had turned down his driveway as the drivers were looking for a party being held elsewhere. Both shooters were convicted of crimes.
“Each fact scenario is different, but it is a troubling trend in our communities across the nation,” said Kent T. Eastwood, the prosecutor in Boone County, Ind., who will be reviewing whether to file charges in the Whitestown shooting. “I think everyone can agree this person should not be dead.”
Still, Mr. Eastwood emphasized that his job is to apply the law and that Indiana has a strong law protecting self-defense rights. Such laws are sometimes known as “stand your ground” laws or, in the home, laws based on the “castle doctrine.”
Among other things, Indiana’s law says that a person can use reasonable force, including deadly force, if the person reasonably believes that is necessary to stop an intruder. In those cases, it is not required that the person first try to retreat.
The question of what’s reasonable, Mr. Eastwood said, is where things can get tricky.
“Our communities are kind of fractured, and a lot of people can no longer agree what’s reasonable,” he said. “So that’s where, as a prosecutor, making those determinations is getting harder and harder. Because what’s reasonable to one group of people isn’t necessarily reasonable to another group of people.”
Mr. Eastwood said he would begin reviewing the Police Department’s report when detectives wrap up their investigation, most likely early next week, and he will then determine whether to file any charges, call a grand jury or decide against charges.
Ms. Ríos Pérez de Velásquez and her husband lived in Indianapolis and began working for a house cleaning company about a year ago, her brother said.
Mr. Ríos Pérez said that his sister and her husband were going to clean a new client’s home on Wednesday. The husband, who later described the moments leading up to the shooting to Mr. Ríos Pérez, said that he had struggled to open the door and that his wife had then taken the keys from him, teasing him for not being able to get it unlocked. Seconds later, she was shot in the head, Mr. Ríos Pérez said.
The family later discovered that the house they had been hired to clean was behind the one they had tried to enter, he said.
He described his sister as always calm, happy and smiling. She loved to dress up and groom her children to go to church.
“They were a happy family,” he said in Spanish. “We can’t go back and change what happened. We can only ask God for help.”
Ms. Ríos Pérez de Velásquez’s children range from 11 months to 17 years, and her youngest will turn 1 this month, her brother said.
“She thought she would have a better future here and give a better future to her children,” he said. “But it was just the opposite.”
Capt. John Jurkash, a spokesman for the local police in Whitestown, said investigators had fanned out across the neighborhood, looking for witnesses and any doorbell cameras that may have captured what happened. He said everyone on the scene, including the two residents, had answered investigators’ questions on Wednesday.
Captain Jurkash said officers had rushed to the scene after a 911 call from the homeowners about people trying to get into their front door. When they arrived, they found the woman with a gunshot wound on the porch, next to her husband.
Georgia Gee contributed research.
