Family members mourn over the casket of Maria Florinda Ríos Pérez on Sunday, Nov. 9, 2025, at Iglesia “Voz De Cristo Al Mundo“ in Indianapolis.

INDIANAPOLIS — An Indiana homeowner accused of fatally shooting a house cleaner who went to the wrong house has been charged with voluntary manslaughter, prosecutors said Nov. 17.

Boone County Prosecutor Kent Eastwood charged Curt Andersen, 62, with a Level 2 felony in the shooting death of Maria Florinda Ríos Pérez de Velázquez, a 32-year-old wife and mother of four. Andersen was booked into the Boone County jail on a no-bond hold, pending an initial court hearing, according to online jail records and prosecutors.

Officers found Ríos Pérez, a Guatemalan immigrant, dead on the front porch of a residence on Nov. 5 in Whitestown, an Indianapolis suburb. She was shot in the head and died in her husband's arms, according to charging documents.

Police said Ríos Pérez and her husband, Mauricio Velázquez, were part of a cleaning crew who had mistakenly arrived at the wrong address. Velázquez previously told the Indianapolis Star, part of the USA TODAY Network, that the couple was trying to find the right key to the home when he heard a shot and caught Ríos Pérez as she fell.

Prosecutors' decision to charge Andersen comes nearly two weeks after the shooting that has sparked debates across the country about "stand your ground" and Castle Doctrine laws. During a news conference on Nov. 17, Eastwood said his investigation determined that Andersen's actions do not fall within the legal protections provided by the state's "stand your ground" law.

"We cannot allow emotion to guide our decisions," Eastwood said at the news conference. "Our duty is to examine the facts, apply the law fairly and equally, and ensure that justice is served without bias or influence. That is the only way the law can truly be just."

'Commotion at the door': Charging documents detail fatal shooting

According to a probable cause affidavit, Andersen told investigators that he and his wife were asleep in the loft area on the second floor of their home when he heard a "commotion at the front door" that intensified. He thought he heard "some type of keys, tools, or instrument" being used on the door, the affidavit states.

Andersen said the commotion scared him, and he walked to the top of the stairwell, where the front door and windows could be seen, according to the affidavit. Looking through his front windows, he saw two people outside who appeared to be trying to open the door.

"Oh no, this is happening and they are going to get in," Andersen told investigators, saying to himself. "What am I going to do? It’s not going away, and I have to do something now."

Andersen said he had prepared for what he would do if someone broke into his home by watching videos and trading in his handgun for a Glock 48 9mm handgun in September, according to the affidavit. He said he had never fired the new weapon and bought it solely to protect his home.

Andersen told investigators that he retrieved the gun from a lockbox, loaded the weapon, and went back to the top of the stairwell. He then saw the two people “thrusting” at the door, "with what he described as getting more and more aggressive," the affidavit states.

He fired one round through the closed front door, according to the affidavit. Moments later, Andersen and his wife both heard a man crying out and weeping on the front porch, they told investigators.

Andersen confirmed to investigators that the door never opened and he did not announce himself before pulling the trigger. Andersen's wife told investigators that neither she nor her husband had gone to the front door. She said she had tried, but her husband stopped her because he worried the people outside might have a gun, the affidavit states.

After the shooting, Andersen's wife called 911, and Whitestown Metropolitan Police Department officers were dispatched to the home at about 6:50 a.m. local time. Officers discovered Velázquez kneeling over the body of his wife next to a large pool of blood on the front porch. A bullet had ripped a hole through the front door and struck Ríos Pérez in the right side of her head, police said.

How the cleaners got the house wrong

Ríos Pérez and her husband were scheduled to clean a model home in the same area as Andersen's property, a representative of Ryan Homes, the builder of the nearby Windswept Farms Subdivision, told investigators.

Velázquez said he and his wife, both Guatemalan immigrants whose primary language is Spanish, had received an address from their boss that brought them to Andersen's home when they entered it into the GPS, according to the affidavit.

The couple believed it was a model home without any residents, the affidavit states. When police entered the address into Google Maps, the directions led to the recently built house just east and behind Andersen's home.

Ríos Pérez was trying to unlock the front door with a key they were given when the gunshot rang out. Her husband said they were on the porch about 30 seconds to a minute before the gunshot, while Andersen told police it was "over a minute," according to the affidavit.

"Mauricio mentioned that in the past, when the keys wouldn’t work, they would just call his boss and inform him, but he didn’t have the opportunity to do so today," the affidavit states.

After initially refusing a police order to exit the home, Andersen and his wife walked out the back door and were detained, according to the affidavit. Ríos Pérez was pronounced dead at the scene.

When Andersen learned that Ríos Pérez was part of a cleaning crew who went to the wrong address, he "became upset and immediately put his head down on the table," the affidavit states. He told police he "didn't mean for anything to happen to anybody."

Indiana case renews debate on 'stand your ground' laws

The voluntary manslaughter charge is a step below murder and means investigators believe Andersen "knowingly or intentionally" killed Ríos Pérez "while acting under sudden heat," according to Indiana law.

Authorities said they believe in and strive to uphold Indiana's "stand your ground" law that protects a person's right to self-defense. But Eastwood noted that the law did not apply to the case because Andersen did not have the "proper information" to determine if his actions were reasonable.

Andersen's defense attorney, prominent Indiana 2nd Amendment lawyer Guy Relford, disagreed with the charge being filed and said in a statement on social media that he "[looks] forward to proving in court that his actions were fully justified by the 'castle doctrine' provision of Indiana's self-defense law."

Wrong-place shootings have plagued communities across the United States for decades, with seemingly completely innocent people being fatally shot or seriously injured when they made simple mistakes. For years, such cases have renewed debates about the nation's patchwork of "stand your ground" laws.

Christopher Slobogin, law professor at Vanderbilt University and director of the school’s Criminal Justice Program, previously told USA TODAY that self-defense laws have proliferated in recent years, and opponents fear they could lead people to overreact and think they are legally justified.

Self-defense claims and "stand your ground" laws have been at the core of several controversial cases, including the killings of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and Ahmaud Arbery in 2020, as well as the trials of Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Perry over the shooting deaths of protesters in 2020.

In recent years, similar cases to the Indiana shooting have sparked outrage and drawn national attention, including in 2023 when an 86-year-old White man shot Ralph Yarl after the 16-year-old Black teenager went to the wrong house in Missouri. Two days after the incident, a 20-year-old woman was shot and killed by a homeowner in upstate New York while in a car that mistakenly turned into the wrong driveway.

Contributing: N'dea Yancey-Bragg, Jeanine Santucci, and Terry Collins, USA TODAY

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana homeowner charged in fatal shooting of house cleaner who showed up at wrong door

Reporting by Jordan Smith, Jade Jackson and Thao Nguyen, USA TODAY NETWORK / Indianapolis Star

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