A 74-year-old hunter in Delaware shot and killed a woman who was walking through an open field with a man and two children, because he thought she was a deer. Santos Maria Chilel Soto, 39, of Georgetown, Delaware, is dead. Walter Moorhead of Salisbury, Maryland, is out on bond.
What Actually Happened Friday Night
According to Delaware State Police, troopers responded at around 7:40 p.m. on Friday to reports of a woman shot in an open field in the town of Ellendale. Chilel Soto had been walking in that field with a man and two children when Moorhead fired his rifle at her from a camouflaged ground blind, a sheltered hunting position designed to conceal a hunter from their target.
Moorhead told authorities he believed he saw a deer. He did not see a deer. He saw a 39-year-old woman in a field. He shot her anyway. Troopers rendered care at the scene before Chilel Soto was transported to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead. NBC News reports that state police identified her by name on Sunday.
Two children were present when this happened. Let that sit with you for a moment.
The Charges, and the Bond That Should Make You Do a Double Take
Delaware State Police charged Moorhead with manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. These are serious charges. What is less serious, apparently, is the price of going home while you await trial for killing a woman in front of her children.
Moorhead was released on a $43,000 cash bond, according to NBC News. To put that in perspective, people get held on higher bonds for nonviolent drug offenses in this country every single day. A man who fired a rifle into a group of people in an open field, killing one of them, was back home before the weekend was over.
As of Sunday, Moorhead had not returned a phone call requesting comment, and it was not immediately clear whether he had retained an attorney. The silence, at least, tracks.
The 'I Thought It Was a Deer' Defense Has a Long and Grim History
Hunting accidents in the United States kill around 100 people every year, according to the International Hunter Education Association. The mistaken-for-game shooting is its own ugly subcategory, and the victims are disproportionately people who were simply existing in or near wooded or rural areas while someone with a firearm made a catastrophic decision to shoot before confirming what they were looking at.
Hunting safety training is explicit on this point. You confirm your target. You identify what is beyond your target. You do not fire at movement, at sound, at a shape that might be what you are hoping to find. These are not advanced concepts. They are the foundational rules drilled into every licensed hunter before they ever touch a trigger in the field.
Moorhead is 74 years old, which means he has had decades of hunting experience. This was not a first-timer who panicked. This was someone who made a choice, and a woman who was walking with children paid for it with her life.
Who Santos Maria Chilel Soto Was
State police identified the victim Sunday as Santos Maria Chilel Soto, 39, of Georgetown, Delaware, as NBC News reports. She was not alone. She was walking with a man and two children in that field on a Friday evening, the kind of ordinary thing people do, the kind of thing that should carry zero risk of being shot by a hunter hiding in a camouflaged shelter.
She deserves more than a paragraph near the bottom of a news story. She deserves more than being identified primarily in relation to the man who killed her. The reporting at this stage is limited, and that is not a criticism of NBC News, it is just the reality of early coverage. But her name is Santos Maria Chilel Soto, and she is the person at the center of this story, not a footnote to it.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe this is a tragedy without a villain. A terrible accident. An old man who made a horrible mistake and will have to live with it. That framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting for Walter Moorhead, and it does not hold up under any real scrutiny. A woman was walking in an open field with a man and two children. She was not wearing camouflage. She was not moving like a deer. She was a person in a group of four people, at dusk, in a field. He shot her with a rifle from a concealed position.
The word 'accident' implies something unforeseeable. There is nothing unforeseeable about what happens when you fire a rifle at a target you have not positively identified. Hunters know this. It is the first thing they are taught. Moorhead did not follow that rule, and Santos Maria Chilel Soto is dead. That is not an accident in the morally neutral sense of the word. That is recklessness with a fatal outcome, which is, not coincidentally, exactly what he has been charged with.
$43,000 bond. Home by the weekend. Meanwhile Chilel Soto's family is planning a funeral and two children watched a woman get shot in front of them on a Friday night. The charges are right. The outcome so far is not even close to matching the weight of what happened in that field in Ellendale, Delaware. Watch this case. Do not let it disappear into the news cycle the way these stories always do.
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