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U.S.|Cleaning Woman Killed Through Door After Arriving at Wrong Home, Police Say
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/us/whitestown-indiana-shooting-cleaner-dead.html
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The shooting of the woman, an immigrant from Guatemala, took place on Wednesday in Indiana, a state with a “stand your ground” law.
Nov. 6, 2025, 8:03 p.m. ET
The sun hadn’t yet risen when the gunshot rang out. A single shot, fired from inside a three-bedroom home in suburban Indianapolis on Wednesday, pierced the front door and fatally struck a house cleaner who had arrived at the porch moments earlier with her husband.
The police in Whitestown, Ind., the small but growing town where the shooting took place, said that two residents had been inside the home that morning when the cleaners arrived. The residents believed their home was possibly being broken into and called 911. In the five minutes between the call and when the police arrived, one of the residents fired from inside the home and struck the woman in the head, officials said.
Detectives are now trying to track down exactly what happened, and prosecutors are preparing to review whether to file charges.
The woman who was killed, María Florinda Ríos Pérez de Velásquez, 32, was a mother of four children and had immigrated with her husband to the United States from Guatemala about three years ago, according to her brother, Rudy Ríos Pérez.
The police have not identified the shooter nor provided any description.
The home where the shooting took place is part of a new development in Whitestown, which is named after Albert S. White, a former U.S. senator and railroad executive in Indiana with ties to President Abraham Lincoln. The house was sold in 2021 to a man who the police indicated was one of the residents inside the home on Wednesday. He could not be reached for comment on Thursday.
The shooting mirrors several others in recent years in which people who arrived at a wrong address were met with gunfire by homeowners worried they were under threat.
