Fatal Shooting of Black Woman Outside Detroit Stirs Racial Tensions

The woman, Renisha Marie McBride, 19, had veered into a parked car. As people emerged from their houses, she appeared disoriented and troubled, some witnesses said, walking off into the darkness before returning for a time, then walking off again. Someone heard her say she wanted to go home.

Several hours later and six blocks away, just outside the Detroit city limits in this mostly white suburb, Ms. McBride, who was black, was dead on the front porch of a stranger’s home, a shotgun blast to her face.

In the days since, the death has stirred long-simmering racial tensions between mostly black Detroit and its whiter suburbs and provoked comparisons to other racially charged cases around the country. Protesters held a vigil outside the house where she died, whose owner has not been publicly identified. The authorities say he thought Ms. McBride, who tests have shown was intoxicated, was trying to break in.

Anguished family members and friends, wearing shirts with messages like “Justice for Nisha,” say they believe that Ms. McBride was merely seeking help at random homes after the crash, and they were troubled that the man who shot her had not been arrested.

And civil rights activists in Detroit have pointedly recalled the cases of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager who was shot last year in a fatal encounter in Florida, and Jonathan Ferrell, a black man who was shot to death by a police officer in Charlotte, N.C., in September when he sought help after a car accident.

The Wayne County prosecutor was expected to announce on Friday whether charges would be brought against the homeowner, but essential details were still lacking to explain how a car accident had led, over a stretch of several hours in the middle of a night, to death on a tiny concrete porch.

Some people here cautioned against presuming that race played a role. Some neighbors of the man, who they said is in his 50s and lives alone in his small house, said the shooting struck them as a tragic accident. Most of all, a long list of questions remained unanswered about events that night, including what actually took place in Ms. McBride’s final moments.

“At the time I didn’t think much of what I was seeing,” said LeDell Hammond, 23, who said he was among a group of neighbors who observed Ms. McBride, seeming dazed, then disappearing, after the car crash along their block of Bramell Street. “But to have this end with that? It’s hard for me to find a way to make it add up.”

In a way, the anger here has become more muted since Kym L. Worthy, the Wayne County prosecutor, made it clear that her office was studying the case. Ms. Worthy, who is black, is widely viewed as a tough, independent prosecutor. She is known, in part, for her prosecution of two white Detroit police officers in the beating death in 1992 of a black motorist, Malice Green, and for pursuing criminal charges in 2008 against Kwame Kilpatrick, then Detroit’s mayor, who would eventually be convicted of federal crimes.

Even Ms. McBride’s family had praise for Ms. Worthy. “There will be justice,” Bernita Spinks, her aunt, said in an interview.

Ms. McBride, who graduated from Southfield High School last year, had once told her sister that she wanted to become a police officer, relatives said, but she had been working for a company that provides temporary workers for light industrial facilities, officials at the company said.

Ms. Spinks remembered her as an average student, a standout soccer player and mostly a loner whose father had spoiled her with several cars since she got her license. “She was a peaceful, kindhearted young lady,” Ms. Spinks said. Family members have said they last spoke with her around 11 p.m. on Nov. 1, shortly before the car accident.

At 12:57 a.m., the Detroit police received a 911 call about a crash. A police spokesman said no police car was sent out because the call was deemed a low priority; no one was reported injured and the driver had left. Along Bramell Street, neighbors described hearing a speeding car and a loud crash, and then seeing a young-looking driver who left, returned, then left again.

At 1:23 a.m., the Detroit police got another 911 call about the accident, the spokesman said, from someone who said that the driver had returned and seemed intoxicated. Mr. Hammond said that at least one neighbor tried to offer Ms. McBride help, but she seemed not to respond. He said he could not see any visible injuries or bleeding. Mainly, he said, she seemed disoriented.

Detroit police officers and an ambulance arrived at 1:37 a.m., the police said, but the woman was gone. By 2:50 a.m., the car was towed and the police left.

Sometime before dawn — and even the timing of the events that followed remain unclear — Ms. McBride was shot in Dearborn Heights, just across Detroit’s border, as she stood on the front porch of a house along Outer Drive, a boulevard-like street of compact homes and trim lawns.

Beyond that, the police in Dearborn Heights, a suburb of about 57,000 people, 86 percent of whom are white, have released few details of the shooting, saying they are awaiting a decision by the prosecutor.

An autopsy showed that Ms. McBride, who was 5-foot-4 and weighed 184 pounds, had a shotgun wound slightly to the left side of her nose. There was no sign that the wound was from close range, the autopsy said. It deemed the death a homicide. Toxicology results showed that her blood alcohol content was nearly 0.218, or almost three times the legal limit for driving.

On a recent afternoon, no one answered the door at the house; the blinds were drawn and a doorbell was visibly broken. The police have said the homeowner believed that she was trying to break in. Cheryl Carpenter, a lawyer for the homeowner, who did not return calls for comment, told The Detroit News, “I’m confident when the evidence comes it will show that my client was justified and acted as a reasonable person would who was in fear for his life.”

But Ms. McBride’s relatives say that they believe her cellphone had run out of power, and that she was knocking on doors in search of help. “If he was scared, all he had to do was call 911,” said Gerald E. Thurswell, a lawyer representing Ms. McBride’s family. “Why would you need a shotgun for an unarmed girl outside your door? And the fact that she was intoxicated makes no difference at all.”

Michigan’s “self-defense” act states that a person may use deadly force if “the individual honestly and reasonably believes that the use of deadly force is necessary to prevent the imminent death of or imminent great bodily harm to himself of herself or to another individual.”

Legal experts said a criminal case would probably be complicated, in part because few people saw what happened.

“There’s likely only one eyewitness to this because the woman can’t tell her story,” said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University Law School. “There are things we’re just never going to know.”