HURLEY, Va. – When a large, 21-year-old man walked into a store armed with a baseball bat, threatening a robbery, Kenny Justus did what any old man would do: He wrestled the bat from the intruder, beat him nearly to death with it and then shot him in the arm.
“He was calling me an old man while we were fighting,” Justus, 64, said. “I told him, the next one he picks on better be older than me.”
Police accused the bat-wielding intruder of trying to rob Justus’s car lot Thursday.
Justin Gregory Charles, badly beaten and with a gunshot wound in his right forearm, was taken to Holston Valley Medical Center by helicopter. Reached in his hospital room, Charles said he was “not very good at all,” but he declined to elaborate on his injuries or how he received them.
Justus threw out his shoulder.
Charles lives with his father next door to Justus Auto Sales, the car lot on Hurley Road where the fight took place.
Justus said he knows Charles well – he’d often stop in to use the phone or borrow the weed eater.
“He just came in and sat down, I thought he looked kinda funny,” Justus said. “Then he got this big wooden bat out and said ‘I’m gonna take your money and your safe.’ ”
At first, Justus got out his little gun, but decided against shooting. “I didn’t want to kill him,” he said. “But I didn’t want to be killed, either.”
That’s when it dawned on Justus to commandeer the bat. The two men wrestled for it until Justus, who describes himself as a lean man, pried it out of the intruder’s hands. Justus said he just wanted to knock him out, but the intruder kept getting up and coming back.
“I beat on him until that bat was in three pieces,” Justus said. “You know if you can’t knock somebody out with a baseball bat, he’s gotta be crazy on drugs.”
Justus said he hit him, straight on the head, until blood spattered the entire office and the bat fell apart.
“Blood was flying everywhere,” Justus said. “It ruined all the furniture, it looked like two pints of blood on the floor.”
Still, the intruder charged him. So Justus pulled the trigger and then called the cops.
Buchanan County Sheriff Ray Foster said charges against Charles are pending.
“I hate to get in a mess like this,” Justus said. “I beat him with his own baseball bat like I was fighting for my life. If he hadn’t brought that bat with him, he’d be better off.”
cgalofaro@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2531
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