Armed Samaritan.

Rebecca Lynn Newton is a gas station attendant in Clayton, North Carolina. Shortly before 9 a.m. on August 14th, she was about to insert an envelope with $400 from her paycheck into an ATM machine at her bank when a man shoved her from behind and blurted, "I'll take that." Newton turned, grabbed the unarmed thug by his shirt, and began screaming.

William Strickland was sitting in his car nearby, waiting for the bank to open. When he heard Newton scream, the permanently disabled former iron worker, who has four titanium rods inserted in his back due to an injury several years ago, grabbed a .22-caliber revolver from the dash of his car and rushed to help her.

The thief had by then jumped into a vehicle backed into a parking spot. As Newton struggled with him through a car door, the vehicle began moving forward. Strickland yelled at the man to stop, then fired two shots at a rear tire. "He still wouldn't stop," Strickland told the next day's Raleigh News & Observer. "I was standing beside the car, and he tried to run me over." With his gun hand poked inside the car, Strickland "asked him to stop again, and he wouldn't do it, so I shot him in the leg."

The wounded thug sped away and escaped. But after Strickland told police that he was certain he had shot him in the right leg, area hospitals were notified to be on the lookout for someone with such a wound. Before long, Morris Levi Stith checked into a hospital for treatment of a gunshot wound to his right leg. He was arrested and charged with robbery and assault with a deadly weapon.

Clayton Police Department Lt. Bill Newsome said that Strickland was unlikely to be charged in the shooting. Thomas Lock, district attorney for the 11th Prosecutorial District (which includes Clayton), told the News & Observer that a person has the right to use deadly force to resist deadly force. "If the suspect in this case was attempting to run over a person, then that person could use deadly force to resist the assault," Lock said. He added that while "no one wants to encourage vigilante justice," he could "understand that a person might feel compelled to intervene when he saw a crime being committed. I might do the same thing under similar circumstances"

Newton described Strickland as her hero. Her fiance, David Little, told the News & Observer, "I'm going to call him over the weekend and ask him what kind of steak he likes. I'm going to have him and his wife and kids over for dinner."