PIERRE, S.D. (SOUTH DAKOTA SEARCHLIGHT) – South Dakota’s “stand your ground” law lets people defend themselves with deadly force if they feel their own life is in danger, they’re somewhere they’re allowed to be, and they aren’t engaged in criminal activity at the time they defend themselves.
Assaulting one person an hour before shooting someone else, the South Dakota Supreme Court ruled, doesn’t count as crime enough to upend an otherwise valid self-defense claim.
The ruling was born of an escalating series of disputes between one resident of a survival bunker community along the southern edge of the Black Hills near Edgemont and employees of the community’s managers, Vivos xPoint Investment Group. The concrete bunkers are remnants of a 1940s military weapons storage depot.
Resident David Streeter accused Vivos employees of harassment following his complaints about the community’s septic system, the Supreme Court opinion says, and his attempts to get law enforcement to intervene didn’t solve the problem.
On Aug. 23, 2024, Streeter chased down a vehicle that sped past his bunker and shoved its driver, a Vivos employee, back into his seat in the confrontation that followed.
Less than an hour later, Streeter got into an argument with another Vivos employee, who’d stopped by Streeter’s property to tell him about some work being done down the road. The Supreme Court’s ruling described that confrontation as heated, but not violent.
The violence came after that employee reported the incident to another Vivos employee, Kelly Anderson.
Anderson, in a series of text messages to a mutual acquaintance of his and Streeter’s, signaled his intention to attack Streeter.
The mutual acquaintance called Streeter to warn him. When Anderson arrived and began to threaten Streeter, Streeter drew a handgun and told him to leave. Anderson, in an exchange captured on video, asked Streeter if he’d ever killed anyone. Streeter said yes. Anderson said he had, too, “with his bare hands,” the Supreme Court opinion says.
Streeter, a former law enforcement officer, shot Anderson in the chest as he approached the 4-foot-high fence that separated Streeter’s property from the rest of the community. Anderson was about a foot away, on the opposite side of that fence, when Streeter fired.
Streeter, who’s an emergency medical technician, told his daughter to call police and “rendered medical aid by placing compression on the wound to control the bleeding,” the opinion said.
A Fall River County grand jury indicted Streeter for simple assault against the man he’d chased down, but didn’t charge him for shooting Anderson.
Anderson opted to file a civil lawsuit. Anderson and Streeter’s attorneys volleyed motions over Anderson’s request to access the grand jury transcripts for weeks as the case proceeded toward a hearing at which a judge would decide if Streeter was immune from liability on self-defense grounds.
In early 2025, on the Friday before that Monday immunity hearing, Anderson’s lawyer asked for a delay to argue for greater access to the grand jury transcripts. The judge denied the request because it came too close to the hearing. The judge ultimately ruled that Streeter had acted within the bounds of South Dakota’s self-defense law.
Anderson appealed to the state Supreme Court, saying the judge should’ve granted the request for a delay and that Streeter’s actions didn’t qualify as self-defense because he’d been aggressive with someone else the same day.
The high court ruled against Anderson on both issues. His lawyer admitted, the opinion says, that he’d waited to file his request for delay. Under court precedent, the justices ruled, a judge is empowered to refuse a delay request if the request is rooted in procrastination.
On the self-defense claim, the opinion says Streeter was clearly somewhere he was allowed to be, his property, and that the death threats and warning put him in fear of deadly harm.
The court also ruled that Streeter’s criminal behavior — his assault of the speeder prior to the shooting incident — didn’t alter his right to defend himself from someone else.
The earlier assault occurred “roughly an hour and a half before his use of deadly force against Anderson,” the opinion says.
“Streeter was justified in using deadly force in self-defense,” it says, and “he was immune from civil liability.”
Comments