A Florida man shot and killed his pregnant wife inside their home early Wednesday morning after he mistook her for an intruder, AP reports.
The shooting occurred at around 1:30 a.m. after he allegedly heard a noise coming from outside the bedroom door. The man told detectives he was unaware that his wife wasn't in the room when he went to look into the source of the sound.
"He gave us a pretty in-depth statement, in which he said that he awoke in the middle of the night, thought he heard somebody in the house, went to investigate with a handgun, saw a shape in the hallway and fired one round and unfortunately, it turned out to be his wife," Martin County Sheriff William Snyder said.
After realizing who he shot, the husband called 911 and told dispatchers he had accidentally shot his wife, who was six months pregnant. She was taken to the hospital where she was pronounced dead. Doctors were able to save their baby.
Authorities have launched an investigation into the incident. "So, though we do have a good statement from him, we don’t take anything to face value and we’ll continue investigating through all backgrounds; there's a lot of investigative steps that we’ll have to make sure that he's telling the truth," Snyder explained.
Snyder said there was also a 2-year-old inside the home at the time of the shooting. "When you have a home where you have family members, you have to be even more careful and wait that extra second and do everything you can to make sure you know what you’re dealing with when you’re about to use deadly force," he said.
