“He looked surprised”:

Their eyes locked.

Then Barbara Holland saw the barrel of the gun.

She lay on the floor in her house after an intruder had knocked her down while pushing through her side door. While on her back, she drew a 9mm handgun from a holster on her waist.

Her assailant’s glare suddenly changed.

“He looked surprised,” Holland said.

Then she pulled the trigger.

Holland, a 38-year-old Detroit business owner and mother, remembers firing three shots. Detroit police told her she fired six.

Either way, she killed the 42-year-old man, Clabe Hunt — who had shoved into her home on Troester, near Hayes, on Detroit’s east side at 8:10 p.m. April 13.

He was an ex-con with five children and was armed with a loaded, nickel-plated semiautomatic handgun that was not registered to him. Autopsy reports indicate he was shot in the head multiple times. He never fired his weapon.

Police officers said Holland’s gun was licensed, and they determined the shooting to be self-defense. . . .

[Holland] is slowly coming to terms with the fact that she took a life. Sometimes she has tinges of remorse. Mostly she feels as though she had to protect herself and her 15-year-old daughter, who was home that night, hiding in the living room after the shots. . . .

Hunt’s five children range in age from 27 to 2, his sister said. . . .

Before going to prison in 1985 for armed robbery, he had attended the now-closed Northeastern High School in Detroit but never graduated.

He was released on parole in 1996, went back in a year later for violating parole and spent 1999 through 2002 in a halfway house . . . .

Thanks to Dan Gifford for the pointer.