A judge and his wife were shot at the front door of their Indiana home, and whoever did it remains on the loose. Security has been tightened at the courthouse where the judge worked following the attack, the latest violent incident against a public servant.
Judge Steve Meyer was ambushed at the front door of his home in Lafayette, Indiana. His wife Kim was at his side, and both of them were wounded when a man with a gun yelled through the door that he had found their dog. The shooter then opened fire through the door and an adjacent window before escaping. It played out just after 2:15 p.m. in the afternoon daylight in an Indiana neighborhood. Yet the gunman has not been publicly identified or caught.
The Lafayette police radio crackled on Sunday with an ominous announcement: “Additional units possibly going to be a shooting…”
The shooting happened in a duplex development near downtown Lafayette, approximately 120 miles southeast of Chicago. Early reports suggested the gunman might have been wearing a disguise of some sort. However, detectives believe he was wearing a hoodie and gym shoes.
The ruse he used, claiming to have found the judge’s dog before opening fire, may have been caught on a doorbell camera – visible in a picture taken from the street to the right of the door and a covered-up window that may have been blasted during the attack.
Judge Meyer and his wife, Kimberly, on the other side of the door and window, were wounded and cut from flying glass. He’s having a second surgery on one arm, and she has damage to her hip. The sudden and yet unexplained attack on a sitting state judge of 12 years has raised questions about motive and judicial security.
“It’s definitely shaken everybody in our community,” said Tippecanoe County Sheriff’s Deptartment Chief Deputy Terry Ruley. “Something you certainly don’t expect to see or hear or want to hear, but it unfortunately happens.”
According to Ruley, since the judge and his wife were shot on Sunday, “Everybody’s been on edge, and additional resources from the sheriff’s office were called out to help try and mitigate this to the farthest extent we could.”
At the Tippecanoe County courthouse, other judges and staff returned Monday after the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to increased security following Sunday’s armed ambush. There was more manpower and more firepower at the judicial center – even as there were more unanswered questions about what led to the incident and who was behind it.
“Precautionary, we’ve decided to take road deputies who are out on patrol, and we’ve requested extra security be present in our courthouse for the rest of this week,” Ruley said.
A recent internal survey of Indiana judges showed that more than half have been threatened. Meanwhile, the FBI and local authorities are scrubbing Judge Meyer’s casework looking for someone with a grudge and the desire to settle a score with a trigger pull.
“You know judges targeted like that, not just locally, but throughout the country, is disturbing. And it’s taken very seriously,” stated Ruley.
Steve Meyer is a well-known Indiana political and judiciary figure. He started as a city council member in Lafayette – a post he held for 23 years. Meyer was elected to the bench as a Democrat in 2014. For the past 12, he has heard numerous hot-button criminal cases and imposed some controversial sentences. Recently he announced that he would not run again for judge. Retirement not soon enough to evade that Sunday attack at his home.
