At 4 a.m., two hours before Sunday’s dawn, Darrell Gibbs was jolted awake by six to eight gunshots fired at the back of his house on the 800 block of Denison Street, southwest Indianapolis.
“I was in bed asleep, and then I hear the gunfire,” Gibbs recounted. “My son taps on the door, tells me what’s happening, and I get dressed and come out back.”
Three masked and armed men were attempting to kick in Gibbs’ back door.
“A busted door jamb where they kept trying to kick it in,” said Gibbs as he assessed the damage. “It held long enough to hold ’em back. But I got bullet holes to the windows, the door window, the door itself, and the wall inside.”
Gibbs’ son told him he had exchanged gunfire with a man in the backyard.
“I see the intruder laying here on the ground, and he wanted me to make a call for him, saying, ‘You know me, you know me,'” Gibbs described. “You don’t come knocking in somebody’s back door… and he lost his gun over by the fire pit, and he was laying there in the weeds.”
Gibbs’ son eventually identified the intruder as a family member. When FOX59 and CBS4 asked Gibbs about the intruder’s identity, he replied, “It was little Matt, my nephew’s son.”
Gibbs said 24-year-old Matthew Kinniard II told him he couldn’t feel his legs after the shooting and asked him to call his relatives.
“I used my phone to call 911 to get somebody out here, the ambulance for him and stuff, and I even made a call to his grandmother with my phone and lifted up the speaker so he could talk to his girlfriend,” Gibbs explained. “If I saw him walking down the street, I couldn’t have told you who he was. That’s how often I been around him.
“I don’t really wish the worst on anybody, but I have no sympathy for anybody doing that. You don’t do that to family. It shouldn’t even be heard of, you know.”
When asked if there was anything worth stealing in his house, Gibbs replied, “No, I work hard enough just to pay the bills.”
“Somebody has probably told him lies, and he thought he could hit a lick here, and it didn’t pan out for him,” Gibbs added.
Gibbs said two men ran away through a neighbor’s yard and jumped into a car parked near a neighborhood church after the shooting stopped. He also mentioned that his son was questioned and released by police.
As of this article’s publication, Kinnaird, who had previously been shot in 2020, remained hospitalized.
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