Police in Colorado say that an Aurora man will not be charged after he admitted pulling his gun on a woman with four children -- including a disabled child -- because she was taking too long to park her car.
Shakia Bush told KMGH-TV that she was waiting for a handicap parking space at a local Walmart recently and a man behind her started honking his horn.
When she got out to tell him to go around because she was waiting for the handicap space, she said that he started yelling obscenities and pulled out a gun.
“He showed it to me in the air, then held it to his chest and said, ‘B****, I have a gun. I will shoot your a**,'” she recalled. "My 10-year old son was saying ‘Mommy, he’s going to shoot you. I don’t want him to shoot you.'"
Bush said that she screamed that the man was "pulling a gun on a woman" before writing down his license plate number and calling 911.
“That’s when he got back into his car and took off,” she said.
Police identified the suspect as Justin West. But in an interview, he insisted that he had pulled the gun because he thought "people were going to jump out and attack him."
According to his version of events, he told Bush, "I have a gun and will defend myself.”
“What was he defending himself from?” Bush wondered. “A mom and four kids? He was angry over a traffic incident. He hopped out of his car first and started yelling and screaming at me.”
“I think he felt a woman was talking back to him, so he needs to prove a point,” she said
Aurora police explained to KMGH-TV that West could not be charged because no gun could clearly be seen in the Walmart surveillance video.
“I really feel that people need to be held accountable for their actions,” Bush lamented. “My children were scared that something was going to happen to them.”
Former Denver prosecutor Karen Steinhauser told KMGH-TV that West could be charged for felony menacing for just holding a gun up to his chest and issuing threats.
“It’s menacing if your intent was to put someone in fear of their life,” she pointed out. “The question investigators have to ask is, ‘Was he in fear of imminent harm?'”
Watch this video from KMGH-TV, broadcast Dec. 11, 2013.
