"I shot him again to make sure he didn't get up,"

Ex-boyfriend kicks in door, new boyfriend kills him

"Erik Richter, armed with a loaded gun, broke into his ex-girlfriend's Wright County apartment after having threatened her. Samantha Simons' current boyfriend, Eric Cegon, shot him.

The crashing back door snapped Eric Cegon and his girlfriend awake in her apartment. Fear grew as they heard feet rapidly climbing the stairs to their barricaded bedroom door about 3:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Cegon, 30, grabbed the shotgun next to their bed and sat up, hoping the locked door would hold. He said he knew the intruder was the man who had threatened his life and held a knife to his girlfriend a week earlier.

The girlfriend, Samantha Simons, covered up her 2-year-old son and screamed as her ex-boyfriend kicked in the door, knocking over the small dresser lodged against it.

"I knew if that door came open what I would do," Cegon said Thursday. He fired the 12-gauge shotgun he had borrowed from a friend two weeks before to protect himself. The blast knocked Erik A. Richter, 35, to the floor.

A loaded gun fell from his hand.

"You killed me," the couple recall Richter saying.

Cegon squeezed the trigger again.

"I shot him again to make sure he didn't get up," Cegon said. "I'll never forget the smell."

Simons, 21, said that Cegon had to do it or that Richter "would have killed us all."