A very sharp samurai sword. (not by coincidence either—with guns, eventually you're going to run out of ammo.)
[September 16, 2009|By Brent Jones, Liz F. Kay and Jill Rosen | Brent Jones, Liz F. Kay and Jill Rosen,brent.jones@baltsun.com]
Hours earlier, someone had broken into John Pontolillo's house and taken two laptops and a video-game console. Now it was past midnight, and he heard noises coming from the garage out back.
The Johns Hopkins University undergraduate didn't run. He didn't call the police. He grabbed his samurai sword.
With the 3- to 5-foot-long, razor-sharp weapon in hand, police say, Pontolillo crept toward the noise. He noticed a side door in the garage had been pried open. When a man inside lunged at him, police say, the confrontation was fatal.
"He was backed up against a corner and either out of fear or out of panic, he just struck the sword with force," said Baltimore Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. "It was probably with fear for his life."
Pontolillo, who rents the house in the 300 block of E. University Parkway in the Oakenshawe neighborhood, struck the intruder no more than twice, police say, nearly severing his left hand and inflicting what police termed a "spear laceration."
The intruder, Donald D. Rice of Baltimore, a 49-year-old repeat offender who had been released from jail only Saturday, died at the bloody scene.
Pontolillo, 20, of Wall, N.J., whose identity was confirmed by law enforcement sources, was released late Tuesday afternoon. Guglielmi said it would be up to the state's attorney's office to determine whether he will be charged in the incident.
In a statement Tuesday, Hopkins officials told students there had been more than a half-dozen burglaries in the area recently, and that police presence would be bolstered.
Diego Ardila, a Hopkins student who lived with Pontolillo in the three-story, five-bedroom house during the summer, said Pontolillo owned a samurai sword and generally kept it in his room. He described Pontolillo as somewhat outgoing, but said they didn't talk a lot.
"You don't expect to hear that someone you know killed a guy with a samurai sword," said Ardila, 19. "From what little I know of him, he wasn't some guy going out to kill."
It is legal to possess a sword in Baltimore, Guglielmi said, and "individuals have a right to defend their person and their property." He declined to comment on whether its use in this case was appropriate.