– Sixteen-year-old Joseph Wagner awoke early Sunday to the screams of his father and a man he had never seen before in his life.

Seconds later, the sound of gunfire filled the house. The man, later identified as 19-year-old James Fritz, of West Palm Beach, was dead. Wagner’s father, Joseph, was not.

“He was looking for blood,” the Wellington High School student said of the intruder.

After breaking a glass window in the kitchen door around 4:15 a.m., Fritz grabbed two large kitchen knives, according to Greenacres police. When the elder Wagner confronted him, instead of dropping the knives, he rushed toward Wagner.

“We have guns for protection, and now we know why,” the young Wagner said Sunday afternoon.

Exactly what drew Fritz to the area was unknown. He arrived on foot, Joe Wagner said.

Later, neighbors told the family they had heard suspicious sounds at about the time. Dogs barked. Shutters rattled. Wagner speculated that Fritz tried to break into other houses in the working-class neighborhood before he reached their house at the end of a dead-end street north of Lake Worth Road and west of Haverhill Road .

He said Fritz smelled of alcohol. But, he said, he knows alcohol alone doesn’t drive someone to do what Fritz did.

Wagner said his father, a general contractor who grew up on the nearly 2-acre piece of land, keeps a gun by his bed.

“We live in the back corner of Greenacres. It’s kind of a secluded spot,” he said. “He knows what goes down around here.”

Although the house had never been broken into before, he said his father took extra precautions because of its isolation.

His father didn’t respond to a request to be interviewed, but the young Wagner said he was doing OK.

Meanwhile, Fritz’s family was devastated and perplexed by the shooting.

“He’s basically a good kid,” said his stepfather, Michael Tapp.

Fritz had told his mother, Robin Gattuso-Tapp, that he was going bowling with his friends on Saturday night. That was the last she heard from him.

Tapp speculated that drugs may have been involved.

“With all the drugs on the streets these days, there’s no telling what he got a hold of,” he said. While Fritz didn’t have a particular drug problem, the youth who would have turned 20 on Friday “experimented,” Tapp said.

Tapp said he wanted the Wagners to know there were no hard feelings.

“I probably would have done the same thing myself,” he said.

In a release, Greenacres Police Capt. Gina Abbananto said the shooting is still under investigation.