Exercising the Right
It’s a Small World After All
The Tampa Bay Times reported on January 26 about a masked man who was shot while trying to rob a convenience store. The paper reported that 30-year-old Christopher Lilly walked into a convenience store in Lutz, Florida, wearing a black mask and holding a gun. He demanded money from the store clerk. Lilly then forced both the clerk and a customer who was in the store at the time at gunpoint to enter the walk-in cooler. Once the two men were in the cooler, Lilly returned to the store to rummage through the cash register. While in the cooler, the customer, who had a permit to carry a concealed weapon, revealed to the clerk that he had a gun on him and offered to let the clerk use it to deal with the armed robber. The clerk took the weapon and snuck out of the cooler, and he confronted Lilly. The clerk fired a warning shot at Lilly, who was so startled that he dropped his gun. Once Lilly was unarmed, both the clerk and the customer rushed him and began wrestling with him in an effort to subdue him. As the men struggled on the floor of the scene, Lilly made an effort to grab his dropped gun. The customer witnessed this and retrieved the firearm that he had lent to the clerk. When the assailant refused to stop his struggle, the customer fired at Lilly, hitting him in the thigh.
Police were called to the scene by a passerby who heard the shots, and Lilly was apprehended as he tried running from the store. The biggest surprise of the whole ordeal was when Lilly was unmasked; the convenience store customer recognized him as a former employee of a landscaping business that the customer owns. Lilly was taken to a nearby medical facility for treatment for non-life threatening wounds to his leg. Once he was released, Lilly was charged with armed robbery and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Pasco County Sheriff’s spokesman Kevin Doll told the Tampa Bay Times that the customer expressed remorse over being forced to shoot a former employee. “[He] feels bad he had to shoot somebody he knew,” Doll said. “[The customer] definitely stopped the crime from being committed and may have saved someone’s life.... Preliminary information indicates he exercised his right with a concealed weapons permit — he was in accordance with the law in what happened.”
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