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Dori: Aubrey Bowlin attacker held up as tragic gun violence victim
Dec 10, 2018, 10:41 AM
Aubrey Bowlin, an experienced motorcyclist, nearly lost her life when a driver with extreme road rage attacked her on I-5. (Aubrey Bowlin)
(Aubrey Bowlin)
You may recall, a few months ago, we had a young motorcyclist on the show named Aubrey Bowlin.
Earlier this year, Aubrey was in a deadly road rage incident on I-5 in Pierce County with a 60-year-old man named Bruce Jones, who was driving a large car. This man forced her off the side of the road. Then he got out of his car amidst the heavy traffic of I-5 and began physically attacking this young woman.
Aubrey Bowlin is a somewhat petite woman, 23 at the time, and she was afraid that this much-larger man was going to kill her. He hit her and shook her, she described, like a dog shaking a toy in its mouth. He violently tried to rip her helmet off, squeezing her neck with the chin strap, which caused her to lose consciousness. Aubrey believed he was going to choke her to death.
RELATED: King County prosecutor reviews self-defense law
She has a legal concealed carry permit, and she was able to reach for her gun and fatally shoot the man attacking her. Aubrey told me:
I’ve never wanted to use my firearm to defend myself — I never wanted to be put in that situation where I had to. I was fighting for my life, and that’s what the whole point of having a concealed weapons permit and having a firearm is — to solely defend your life, and that’s what I did, because I thought he was going to take mine … It was me or him, and I was coming home.
Aubrey was exonerated by the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, as this was clearly a self-defense case. She still, however, suffers PTSD from the violent attack every single day, as she told us on the show.
The reason I bring this up now is because a listener this week brought to my attention that an anti-gun website, which puts up photos of people whose lives have been “lost to gun violence,” has put up a photo of this guy that Aubrey shot, Bruce Jones.
How utterly ridiculous is that? Bruce Jones wasn’t “lost to gun violence.” This is a man who nearly pummeled a young woman to death with his bare hands. The reason he died was because Aubrey was defending herself from him.
Let me repeat that — it was not violence, it was self-defense. He was choking her, and she thought he was going to kill her. For anyone to put Bruce Jones up as some sort of poster-child for victims of gun violence is unbelievably crazy.
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