Rajah Bose for The New York Times
The house, right, where Dan Fredenberg, looking for his wife, was fatally shot by Brice Harper last month in Kalispell, Mont.
KALISPELL, Mont. — The last mistake Dan Fredenberg made was getting killed in another man's garage.
It was Sept. 22, and Mr. Fredenberg, 40, was upset. He strode up the driveway of a quiet subdivision here to confront Brice Harper, a 24-year-old romantically involved with Mr. Fredenberg's young wife. But as he walked through Mr. Harper's open garage door, Mr. Fredenberg was doing more than stepping uninvited onto someone else's property. He was unwittingly walking onto a legal landscape reshaped by laws that have given homeowners new leeway to use force inside their own homes.
Proponents say the laws strengthen people's right to defend their homes. To others, they are a license to kill.
That night, in a doorway at the back of his garage, Mr. Harper aimed a gun at the unarmed Mr. Fredenberg, fired and struck him three times. Mr. Fredenberg crumpled to the garage floor, a few feet from Mr. Harper. He was dead before morning.
Had Mr. Fredenberg been shot on the street or sidewalk, the legal outcome might have been different. But on Oct. 9, the Flathead County attorney decided not to prosecute, saying that Montana's "castle doctrine" law, which maintains that a man's home is his castle, protected Mr. Harper's rights to vigorously defend himself there. The county attorney determined that Mr. Harper had the right to fetch his gun from his bedroom, confront Mr. Fredenberg in the garage and, fearing for his safety, shoot him.
"Given his reasonable belief that he was about to be assaulted, Brice's use of deadly force against Dan was justified" under current Montana law, Ed Corrigan, the county attorney, wrote in a four-page letter explaining his decision to the Kalispell police.
The shooting raises similar questions about armed citizens and their right to self-defense as the February shooting of Trayvon Martin, 17, in Florida, with the critical difference that Mr. Martin was shot outside.
In Montana, it has focused new scrutiny on whether the castle doctrine measure, implemented in 2009, has given homeowners the authority to defend themselves against real threats or has provided a way to kill without consequences.
"The community has not been well-served by either the law or the legal process in this case," the local newspaper, The Daily Inter-Lake, wrote in a recent editorial.
In 2009, Montana joined more than 20 other states in passing broad self-defense measures backed by the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups. Under the law, a person can brandish a gun to ward off a threat. An individual does not have to flee or call the police before engaging in self-defense.
For criminal trials in which a defendant claims self-defense, the legislation flips the burden of proof, putting the onus on prosecutors to discredit those claims.
"It changed things here in Montana," said Leo Gallagher, president of the Montana County Attorneys Association, which joined associations of sheriffs and police chiefs to oppose the law. "For any sort of personal affront, you're permitted to threaten the person with a gun."
To Mr. Fredenberg's family, the county attorney's decision not to press charges hit like a fourth bullet. They acknowledged that Mr. Fredenberg, a hot-rod lover who painted, fixed and restored cars, had made his share of bad decisions in life. He often drank too much — his blood alcohol level was 0.08 on the night he died. He had a turbulent love life. He struggled financially.
But they said Mr. Fredenberg was also big-hearted, a doting father to his four children and a practical jokester — "40 years old going on 25," his father put it. They said he was not violent and had done nothing that night to deserve being killed.
"It's tearing me up," said his father, Ron Fredenberg, a retired police officer and detective in Kalispell. "Dan was totally unarmed."
Mr. Fredenberg's long path to that slate-blue duplex at Empire Loop began about two years earlier, when he started dating a young barista named Heather King. After finding out she was pregnant with twins, the two eloped to Las Vegas, where they started what was by all accounts a rocky marriage.
Heather Fredenberg, 22, said she and Dan were passionate about each other, but also bickered about child care, bills, fixing the car and other stresses amplified by having two infants and not enough time or money. The county attorney's report said they were "mutually abusive with each other, both verbally and physically." More than once they considered divorcing.
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