Armed Mother of Two and Off Duty Cop Shoots Gunman on Mothers Day

U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)-Brazil is notorious for a high violent crime rate which is why it was no surprise that 21-year-old Elivelton Neves Moreira tried to rob a group of mothers with their children during a Mother’s Day event in Sao Paulo on Saturday.

The mothers were waiting at the gates of a private school where the event was supposed to take place. Moreira, armed with a gun, approached the group with ill intentions. He just robbed the unarmed school security guard of his wallet, and cell phone before shifting his attention to the mothers. One of the people standing near the group being robbed was Katia da Silva Sastre.

Sastre is a 42-year-old mother of a seven-year-old and a two-year-old daughter. She is also a 20-year police veteran who was attending the event with her oldest child. She was off-duty, but she felt the need to spring into action to protect the other mothers and their children.

Sastre was carrying a concealed handgun in her purse. She was able to pull her gun and fired three shots into Moreira’s chest. She took cover behind a car, but the car drove away. Surveillance footage from the scene shows Sastre approaching Moreira’s dropped .38 revolver and kicked it away all the while keeping her gun trained on Moreira.

Moreira would succumb to his wounds in the hospital where he was pronounced dead by doctors.

“I didn’t know if he was going to shoot the kids or the mothers or the security guard at the school door,” Sastre told her co-workers. “I just thought about defending the moms, the children, my own life and my daughter’s.”

Sastre had a right to be worried about her safety. Sao Paulo has a high murder rate. In 2015 the murder rate was 53.05 for every 100,000 people. In many cases, these murders started out as a simple armed robbery and escalated quickly to a murder.

“These criminals lose control easily. Katia didn’t know if he was going to react by shooting at the children, the moms or the head teacher who was at the school entrance,” said a spokesman for the Sao Paulo police. “She just thought about defending the parents, the children, herself and her daughter.”

Sao Paulo Governor Marcio Franca hailed Sastre as a hero and visited her at the police station where she works.

“I went earlier to the 4th BAEP in the east of Sao Paulo to honor a very special mother: Corporal Katia Sastre. Her courage and precision saved mothers and children, yesterday at the door of a school,” Franca wrote on Twitter.

“She went to the party to celebrate the date, and a situation like this happened. She acted so precisely, so perfectly, that we decided to honor her,” Franca told Folha de S.Paulo paper.

Sastre, like most heroes, doesn’t view anything that she did as being heroic. She believes she was just in the right place at the right time and credited the training she received as a police officer for giving her the ability to stop the criminal before he could hurt anyone.

“I had to act quickly to end his aggression and prevent him from harming anyone. I reverted to the training I have received in the corporation,” Sastre said to the paper. “It’s gratifying to have been in the right place to have saved all our lives.”

Firearms can be the great equalizer when a brave woman stares down the threat of an armed criminal in the streets.

It goes to show a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun. Especially when that good guy is a mother protecting her children.

About John Crump

John is a NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. He is the former CEO of Veritas Firearms, LLC and is the co-host of The Patriot News Podcast which can be found at www.blogtalkradio.com/patriotnews. John has written extensively on the patriot movement including 3%’ers, Oath Keepers, and Militias. In addition to the Patriot movement, John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. John lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and sons and is currently working on a book on the history of the patriot movement and can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss or at www.crumpy.com.

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