Suburban Detroit man guilty in death of Renisha McBride

DETROIT — To the relief of activists and survivors who feared yet another white man would be acquitted after the slaying of yet another unarmed black teen, a jury on Thursday convicted a 55-year-old maintenance worker of second-degree murder after shooting Renisha McBride on his front porch last November.

Theodore Wafer, who was immediately taken into custody, now faces life in prison after the jury of seven men and five women – including four black jurists – found him guilty of murder, manslaughter and felony use of a firearm. Judge Dana Hathaway is scheduled to sentence him on Aug. 21.

Wafer was impassive and unexpressive as the verdict was read, a typical demeanor for him since the shooting, with the exception of his tearful, soft-spoken testimony earlier this week. Monica McBride, mother of the 19-year-old victim, hugged the prosecutors and then told the media, “I’m astonished. I’m very pleased.”

Wafer shot McBride, 19, after she knocked on his door a few hours after she wandered away from crashing her car and hitting her head. Wafer’s defense attorneys failed to persuade the jury that a discombobulated Wafer, awoken at about 4 a.m. on Nov. 1 by banging on the door, believed multiple attackers were laying siege on his Dearborn Heights home.

Yet after seven hours of deliberations over two days, the panel decided he had acted recklessly and without provocation when he opened his locked front door and fired his shotgun through the screen. Wafer, who has lived alone in the home for 20 years, testified he couldn’t find his cell phone until after the shooting and that he doesn’t have a landline. If he had, he said, he would have called 911 instead of opening the door and shooting McBride.

While neither side said they viewed race as a motive for the shooting, many observers worried that the criminal justice system wouldn’t bring Wafer to justice or regard McBride’s death as significant. Part of the defense dealt with the prospect that McBride, who was found with marijuana and a blood alcohol level of twice the legal limit when she was killed, might have been erratic and menacing to a shy, older white man whose neighborhood, according to him, had seen an uptick in crime in recent years.

A major pivot in the case was the question of whether Wafer had reason to fear McBride. The prosecution did not doubt his contention that he didn’t know she was either black or female when he shot her, but many of the defense’s questions during jury selection focused on whether the prospective juror believed it is possible for a woman to seem threatening to a man.

That she was a woman while the other cases involved male victims, said University of Michigan law professor Eve Primus, may have been a factor in Wafer’s conviction.

“Here, the jury clearly did not believe that it was reasonable for him to fear her,” Primus said. “Perhaps it is because she was female and our society views females as less dangerous than men or perhaps, and perhaps more probably, there were facts here suggesting that he was not afraid. “

“The ruling,” Primus added, “would have been more significant as a social matter if they had acquitted him, because many people would cite an acquittal on these facts as supporting their claim that society is racist and still views African-Americans as inherently dangerous.”

McBride’s parents had their own thoughts on why they got satisfaction while the families of other slain black youths did not. 

“The thing we did was we stayed out of the media and let the prosecutors build their case,” said Walter Simmons, McBride’s father. “We didn’t jump in front of the mic and try this case in the media. That’s the best thing we could have done.”

Fancher agreed that that strategy may have worked but noted that McBride’s family may not have had to clamor for attention because the other families, particularly that of Martin, had already raised awareness of such situations.

“The attorneys made strategic decisions in the Trayvon Martin case to go to the media that resulted in much more attention being paid to that case in Florida and outside of Florida than otherwise would have happened,” Fancher said. “In the McBride case, there was already a lot of attention being paid, probably because of the Trayvon Martin case. It may have played some role in having prosecutors in Michigan and the media gave it more attention than it otherwise would have gotten.”