Man fatally shot by neighbor for using leaf blower in own yard, police say

An Illinois man doing yard work outside his home was fatally shot in the head by his 79-year-old next-door neighbor this month after the two got into an argument over the man’s leaf blower, authorities said this week.

The shooting in Antioch, Ill., is among several recent high-profile incidents of people being shot while doing mundane, everyday actions, from ringing a doorbell to pulling into a driveway.

The Lake County Sheriff’s Office responded on April 12 to a report of an unresponsive man on a driveway in Antioch, an unincorporated village near the Wisconsin border that’s about 60 miles outside of Chicago, authorities said in a news release. When they arrived after 7:30 p.m., deputies found the homeowner, William Martys, 59, with a gunshot wound to the head. Martys was pronounced dead at the hospital.

The sheriff’s office arrested Ettore Lacchei, Martys’s neighbor, on Tuesday and charged him with murder after deputies found that the 79-year-old “had various perceived grievances with Martys.” Lacchei took issue with Martys’s noisy leaf blower and the two got into an argument, according to WBBM, a CBS affiliate in Chicago.