Pedro Cantu, a 62-year-old pastor who spent three decades leading his congregation, is dead because a burglar broke into his west Houston home just after midnight on a Saturday morning. He wasn't killed by the intruder. He was accidentally shot by his own 35-year-old roommate, who was attempting to defend the residence.

According to KHOU, officers from the Houston Police Department responded to the home on South Kirkwood Road near Carriage Hill Drive in the Memorial area after a 911 call reported broken glass and a break-in. When they arrived, they heard at least one gunshot from inside the house. They found and detained a man who had a gun and discovered two other men wounded, one of them Cantu.

Cantu was taken to an area hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The burglar, 44-year-old Rodney Dushaw Yoder, was also hospitalized and is expected to survive. Yoder was later charged with burglary of a habitation.

A Peaceful Man in a Violent Moment

Cantu's daughter, Perla Cantu, offered a portrait of her father that makes the circumstances of his death all the more painful. She told reporters:

"I want people to know that my father was a peaceful man."

"He did not own a firearm, regardless of what you may have heard."

Pedro Cantu had served as a longtime pastor at Amor & Restauracion Church for about 30 years. By every account, he was a man of faith and community, not conflict. On Sunday, hundreds showed up at the church for an emotional prayer service honoring his life and legacy.

That a man who devoted his life to ministry was killed inside his own home, by a bullet meant to stop a criminal, is a tragedy that defies easy political sorting. It simply hurts.

The Real Villain Walked In Through the Window

There will be those who seize on this story to argue against firearms in the home. That impulse misreads the entire chain of events. The roommate was not the aggressor. The roommate responded to a home invasion in the middle of the night, a scenario where the right to armed self-defense exists for precisely this reason. A terrible outcome does not erase the legitimacy of the act.

The person who set this tragedy in motion was Rodney Dushaw Yoder. He allegedly broke into an occupied home after midnight. He created the conditions under which an armed resident had to make a split-second decision in the dark. Every consequence that followed flows from that initial criminal act.

Texas law recognizes this. The state's felony murder doctrine exists because when a person commits a dangerous felony, and someone dies as a result, the moral and legal responsibility belongs to the person who initiated the criminal conduct. Yoder has been charged with burglary of a habitation. Whether additional charges follow remains to be seen, but the legal framework is clear: you break into someone's home, you own what happens next.

It remains unclear whether the break-in was targeted or random. That distinction matters for the investigation, but changes nothing about the moral calculus. No one should have to wonder, at midnight, whether the sound of breaking glass is personal or just bad luck.

What Self-Defense Actually Looks Like

Defenders of the Second Amendment rarely pretend that armed self-defense is clean or cinematic. It is chaotic, terrifying, and sometimes yields outcomes no one wanted. The roommate in this case did what millions of Americans believe they would do and hope they never have to: grabbed a firearm and confronted an intruder in their home.

The cost was unspeakable. A good man is dead. A community lost its pastor. A daughter lost her father. And all of it traces back to one man's decision to break into a house that wasn't his.

This is the part of the conversation that gun control advocates consistently skip. They want to talk about the gun in the roommate's hand. They never want to talk about the criminal whose actions forced that hand. The firearm didn't create the danger. Yoder did.

Thirty Years of Service, Ended in Seconds

Pedro Cantu built something real over three decades of ministry. Hundreds of people filled his church the next day, not because of how he died, but because of how he lived. That kind of turnout doesn't happen for a figurehead. It happens for someone who showed up, week after week, year after year, for the people around him.

Anyone with information about the incident is asked to call the HPD Homicide Division at 713-308-3600.

A pastor who never owned a gun died by one, in his own home, because a stranger decided that home was his to enter. The burglar survived. The pastor did not. That is the fact that should sit with everyone who reads this story.