Boy, 11, Fires at Man Who Shot Mother

After his mother had been wounded by a shotgun blast, an 11-year-old boy grabbed a .22-caliber rifle and opened fire on her ex-boyfriend. The man was fatally wounded in the shooting near this desert community, authorities said Monday.

“My mom gets shot with a 12-gauge shotgun and I ain’t going to sit there and act dumb,” Donovan Durst, a tow-headed, slender boy, was quoted as saying.

San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Lt. Dave Baker said the sixth-grader fired at Michael Morris, 32.

But, pending completion of a ballistics test, Baker said, he could not say whether the three shots that hit Morris, striking his heart and lungs, were fired by Donovan or by his mother, Linda Durst, 38, who underwent skin-graft surgery Monday at San Bernardino County Medical Center. No charges are pending, he said.

Relatives said that Durst had broken up with Morris about two months ago and that, about two days before the shooting, she had notified authorities that he had threatened her.

On Tuesday night, Morris, a tall, muscular man with shoulder-length brown hair and a full, dark beard, broke into the loft-area quarters of a crudely built red barn where Durst and her younger children live, about 10 miles north of Phelan in the Mojave Desert, Baker said. Morris was armed with a shotgun.

There was an exchange of gunfire as Morris entered the living area, but investigators do not know who shot first or whether Morris was struck by bullets that Linda Durst fired from a .22-caliber revolver, according to Baker.

Struck by shotgun pellets that tore at her left arm and side, Durst fled into the bedroom, where the boy--waiting with a rifle--opened fire when Morris followed, Baker said. Morris turned, ran outside and fell mortally wounded.

“I was real scared but I could still think what I had to do,” the boy told the San Bernardino Sun.”I kept shooting at him until he was lying dead. It made me so mad my mom was shot. I was crying while I was shooting. I had to shoot him before he shot all of us.” Durst’s 8-year-old daughter, Becky, and 14-month-old twins were hiding in the bathroom.

‘Doing All Right’

While he cleaned up the Durst home on Monday, Jimmy Durst, 18, said younger brother Donovan is “doing all right.”

“Everyone is trying to make him not feel guilty,” Jimmy Durst said. “He had to do it. He knows he had to do it. He saw his mom sitting next to him shot. I can’t believe this happened. It should have stopped a long time ago. Mike was calling the house all day threatening my mother.

“They had split up a lot of times before, but she always forgave him and he would come back.”

Donovan was staying in Riverside with his older brother, Richie, 22, on Monday, expecting to return to school this week.

At the Pinon Mesa Middle School in Phelan, counselor Ron Robbins was preparing for Donovan’s return. “I want to make sure he can handle it back in school,” Robbins said. “To have gone through that much trauma, I don’t want kids poking fun at him or bothering him.”

Donovan’s teacher, Valerie Light, said Donovan is “bright in a common-sense manner. . . . He can pick up innuendo and irony in an adult manner. I feel really bad for Donovan. What a horrid situation to be in for an 11-year-old.”