Court documents shed light on Indiana shooting that sparked stand-your-ground debate

The 62-year-old man who shot and killed a house cleaner who mistakenly arrived at his Whitestown home has been charged with voluntary manslaughter.

Boone County Prosecutor Kent Eastwood has charged Curt Andersen with a Level 2 felony in the Nov. 5 shooting death of Maria Florinda Ríos Pérez de Velázquez, a 32-year-old wife and mother of four, after she showed up for a housekeeping job.

The charge, announced Nov. 17, is a step below murder and means investigators believe Andersen “knowingly or intentionally” killed Ríos Pérez “while acting under sudden heat,” according to Indiana law.

Officials said they believe in and strive to uphold Indiana’s “Stand Your Ground” law that protects a person’s right to self-defense. But in this case they “determined that Curt Andersen’s actions do not fall within the legal protections” offered by that statute.

The facts show that “Curt Andersen fired one shot through a closed locked door from the top of his stairs knowing two individuals were on the other side of the door, fatally striking Maria Florinda Ríos Pérez de Velázquez,” police found.

His defense attorney, prominent Indiana 2nd Amendment lawyer Guy Relford, disagreed with the charge being filed and said on social media he “[looks] forward to proving in court that his actions were fully justified by the ‘castle doctrine’ provision of Indiana’s self-defense law.”

What the probable cause affidavit filed in Whitestown shooting says

Andersen told police that he went to bed around 2-3 a.m. Nov. 5 and woke up a few hours later when he heard commotion at the front door of his home on Maize Lane in Whitestown, according to charging documents.

He walked from the second-floor loft where he and his wife were sleeping to the top of an indoor stairwell. Looking through his front windows, he saw two people outside who appeared to be trying to open the door.

“Oh no, this is happening and they are going to get in,” Andersen told police he said aloud. “What am I going to do? It’s not going away and I have to do something now.”

Andersen had prepared for what he would do if someone broke into his home by watching videos and trading in his handgun for a Glock 48 9mm handgun this September, he told police. He said he had never fired the new weapon and bought it solely to protect his home.

While he retrieved the gun from a lockbox, the noises outside his door seemed to intensify and “terrified him.” He told officers that 10-15 seconds after he finished loading the gun, he stood at the top of the stairs and pulled the trigger.

He fired one round through the closed front door. He did not announce himself beforehand, he said. Moments later, Andersen and his wife both heard a man crying out and weeping on the front porch, they told police.

After the shooting his wife called 911, and Whitestown Metropolitan Police Department officers were dispatched to the home at 6:50 a.m. They found Mauricio Velázquez kneeling over the body of his wife next to a large pool of blood on the front porch. A bullet had ripped a hole through the front door and struck the woman in the right side of her head, police say.

Andersen’s wife told police that neither she nor her husband had gone to the front door. She told police she had tried, but her husband stopped her because he worried the people outside might have a gun.

How the cleaners got the house wrong

Ríos Pérez and her husband were scheduled to clean a model home in the same area as Andersen’s property, a representative of Ryan Homes, the builder of the nearby Windswept Farms Subdivision, told police.

Velázquez told investigators that he and his wife, both Guatemalan immigrants whose primary language is Spanish, had received an address from their boss that brought them to Andersen’s home when they entered it into the GPS. They believed it was a model home without any residents. When police entered the address into Google Maps, the directions led to the recently built house just east and behind Andersen’s home.

Ríos Pérez was trying to unlock the front door with a key they were given when the gunshot rang out. Her husband said they were on the porch between 30 seconds to a minute before the gunshot, while Andersen told police it was “over a minute.”

“Mauricio mentioned that in the past, when the keys wouldn’t work, they would just call his boss and inform him,” police state, “but he didn’t have the opportunity to do so today.”

After initially refusing a police order to exit the home, Andersen and his wife walked out the back door and were detained. Ríos Pérez was pronounced dead at the scene.

When police told Andersen that Ríos Pérez was part of a cleaning crew who went to the wrong address, he “became upset and immediately put his head down on the table.” He told police he “didn’t mean for anything to happen to anybody.”

Hours after the shooting and the interrogation, officers took Andersen home and he reenacted the events.

Email Indianapolis City Hall Reporter Jordan Smith at JTsmith@gannett.com. Follow him on X: @jordantsmith09