BELMONT, N.C. – A 20-year-old suspect in last September’s foiled robbery at Fort Financial CU is about to go on trial in an unusual case for allegedly "scaring to death" a 79-year-old woman who died of a heart attack after the suspect forced his way into her house to hide.
Larry Whitfield was on foot, his getaway car wrecked, his first attempt at robbing a bank foiled by a set of locked doors, according to detectives. Looking for a place to hide, police say, he found himself inside the home of a frightened old woman, Mary Parnell.
Now Whitfield, a 20-year-old with no prior criminal record, is charged with first-degree murder, a rare defendant accused of literally scaring a person to death.
Parnell's husband had left the home for about an hour to attend a funeral when Whitfield knocked at the door, police said.
Police caught Whitfield three houses away as he ran.
Under a legal concept known as the felony murder rule, it's not uncommon for prosecutors to bring a murder charge against a defendant who doesn't intentionally harm a victim. The rule exists in some form in every state and lets authorities bring murder charges whenever someone dies during a crime such as burglary, rape, or kidnapping.
Prosecutors typically use the rule to charge all of the suspects with murder when, say, one of them shoots a teller during a bank robbery. But cases of prosecutors using the felony murder rule to charge a defendant with scaring someone to death are isolated.
Doctors listed Parnell’s cause of death as a heart attack due to "stress during home invasion."
