At exactly 9:00 PM Sunday I heard an odd noise that startled me out of a half-sleep. I did not know if I was dreaming or what but I got up (gun not in hand yet) to discover a GUY STANDING IN MY KITCHEN babbling something! I turned back into my bedroom and grabbed my CZ and flashlight and returned and he had gone out the back door. I threw on some sweats, cleared the house and called 911. They said deputies are on the way and asked I stay on the front porch and secure my weapon. The first showed up and drove past and I shined my light at him and he backed up. Two others rolled up and one walked up my driveway and about that time I heard yelling and it was the others yelling at someone to stop and one drew down on the guy over my fence toward the neighbors yard. I had already texted my neighbor but he already saw the lights and heard the commotion. Two LEOs were on top of the guy and he was out of his mind. They knew who he was and he had just got out of jail and was on parole. He now has burglary 1 and trespassing facing him. The LEOs were very professional and had no problem with me carrying my gun. They told me I handled the situation well and and I told them if he had still been in my kitchen when I returned with my gun this would probably have turned out very different. They told me I was on 'good grounds' if it had - as a known criminal who had broken in my house. After he was in the back of the LEO pickup they told me to go look at him an make a positive ID - it was him as I described him very close including the color of the shirt he had on. He was so out of his mind he looked like a caged animal and was chewing on the expanded metal cage in the back. Crazy night and what an adrenaline rush - I didn't get to sleep until after 4 AM Monday morning.

Very glad you're OK, sir.

Andy

well, its good you didn't have to force him or use any force.

Good for you to do what you did!

Glad it turned out well and your OK.
Time for a puppy?

I am glad it turned well for you.

I might make the following observations:

(1) Glad you're alright.

(2) Suppose he hadn't let you retreat to get your gun?

(3) Suppose he had friends when you went to "clear" the house?

(4) I tend to not get legal advice from sheriff's deputies who have to work the night shift on a Sunday.

Thank you on # 1 & # 4
I don't even want to think about # 2 & # 3

I would very much take note how he got in.

Glad everything ended well.

Also curious why he picked your house?
You have a car in the driveway?

Good example of how fast bad things happen. Glad you are unharmed.

I don’t know that I’ve ever known any Deputy Sheriff that didn’t have to work the night shift on a Sunday at some point in his/her career.

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SWCA #1917

Yes one of mine in the driveway.
Consensus was it was completely random and as high as he was he most likely had no idea where he was - he WAS out of his head.
He had formerly been in the news about being wanted on a parole violation.

Everyone needs to be glad there are LEO’s out there working night shift...

Beside people wanting to rob, steal or even harm, add the people that are crazy on drugs. That's one reason we need to have a stout gun with plenty of rounds. If two or three big policemen can't handle a person in that state, what chance do I have?

I'd say, yes, you did do extremely well there and that let the police do their jobs w/o extra worries of a hyped up home owner trying to take things into his own hands when not necessary. That sounds like a really nerve racking way, even more than normal, for a typical break in. Especially with your family at home.

Who remembers the old saw, "Next time your are being robbed, call a hippy."

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

a security system might be a good investment. and a pup, preferably a rescue pup. glad it turned out well and thanks for posting your experience.

I got a little PTSD flare-up reading your post. I have been in two situations in recent years that, although they involved burglary and drug-addled loons, probably could not match the stress you experienced if combined together. I'm glad everything turned out OK.

I don't understand . . .

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Wisdom comes thru fear . . .

Get a dog.

Very likely to keep the bad guy from trying your house.

The dog will also let you know somethings wrong long before you’d otherwise know.

Doesn’t need to be big or mean.

How did he gain access to your home?

Cpl yrs ago, garage door opens @ 2 am! I rush down with gun (it was OBVIOUS!). They got the door opener out of wife's unlocked car. Almost met them nose to nose. Dogs barking ran them off just before I got in garage. LEOs showed up. I had my 45. Asked if I was sure they hadn't gotten in the house. Said I did a quick clear before they got there. We agreed I do another little more thorough clear. Gun in hand. They waited in the garage. Unspoken was, if I found someone and dealt with it, much easier paperwork than if THEY had a confrontation. No issue on my part!

Glad you are all right. Not how I would like to enjoy a weekend evening.

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Mike
S&WCA #3065

The 12v outlet in my Honda did not work without the key, but the built-in GDO button sure did. Not too smart on Honda's part, IMO.
I got an alarm system long ago so I would not be surprised by a bad guy before I had time to act. Added benefit is smoke detector monitoring while you are not home.
Also wondering how the guy gained entry.

You need to rethink your response to things that go bump in the dark, glad it all worked out, but this encounter could have gone badly but for the grace of God. You need to establish a discipline of how you would respond and implement it...... checking on a noise without your weapon was the first step on a very slippery slope. All the best.

Point's kind of tongue-in-cheek. If you want to have zero sense of humor about anything, hats off to you, enjoy the coronary you're gonna give yourself being outraged at everything.

I mean, I could have said, "I don't take legal advice from people that aren't lawyers", but that's so much less light-hearted.

I kind figured you were about reaching that conclusion yourself. Actually having to do this stuff is a pretty sharp motivator.

That said, I totally get it. What are you going to do, call 911 every time the house settles? We can drone on endlessly about defensive positions and not doing whole-house clears, but when things actually happen, it's incredibly hard to make the decision to call the police. Nobody wants to look like a doofus, everybody wants to criticize that one guy in a thousand that winds up shooting a fool or getting killed himself. It was one of the things that lead me to resolve to always have a gun and a phone on me. At least then, I can stand very still and listen, wherever I am, and have all the stuff I need to respond.

Yeah, in my complex, if you call 911 and no one gets arrested or carted off to the hospital, the local PD/FD charges the complex, and the complex charges the resident.

So when I see someone breaking into cars, I go out back to the creek (a public park) and call from there. Not in the complex, no fine.

Texas complex run by Kommifornia management company. Enough said.

I would add my vote for a security system - with focus on the especially vulnerable area (window, I assume) that allowed him to enter unnoticed. I know this is a firearm website - but a firearm is a last resort for me in our home defense plan. My wife constantly yells at me for doing it - but I arm our system to "instant" every night before going to bed. Sure, someone could get past it but they'd have to make some noise getting past double-paned glass throughout the house. Plus - all three of the most exposed windows have the little (cheapy - $10) glass break detectors installed on them. Do we have 100% guaranteed safety? No - but I've done everything I can to try to keep slime-balls out of our home ...

Very glad it turned well, but I have two concerns. First of all, I understand why they told you to secure your firearm, but why secure it before they arrive? The guy could have been anywhere. Tell the arriving officers that you are armed and follow their instructions. Second, perhaps you live alone, but if not you want to be where you can protect your family until LE arrives. All things considered, sounds like you did well.

Holy ****.....terrifying situation. Glad you are ok and I'm happy to hear they got the bad guy.

Glad this situation turned out as well as it did. Hopefully, with this perp demonstrating that his previous incarceration has not made a positive improvement in his behavior, he will be incarcerated for many, many years.

There have been several "bump in the night" episodes in which my first action has been to grab my handgun and a flashlight. So far, all of mine have turned out to be nothing, but better to be prepared than to face a more determined adversary and be unprepared.

Thank God you're ok and suffered no loss. I am EXTREMELLY curious as to why you didn't take your gun with you when you went into the kitchen the first time?

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Stay protected my friends.

Great to hear all turned out well for you and your family and neighbors......

Memo to brain: Always take weapon with you if you hear strange noises in your house late at night....

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Hipcocked45

Glad you are OK! After a time in municipal LE, I was Chief of a campus department for many years. Every few years a drunk student would enter a home in the surrounding neighborhood totally oblivious to where they were. On one occasion a woman woke up in the morning to find one asleep on her couch in the front room. All cases i dealt with doors or windows were not locked.it

Good deadbolt locks are great but don't forget to lock up before going to bed.

Out of his head in the back of the police car and chewing on the cage...how many of us secretly want to know what kind of drugs he was on and where we can get some?

Please accept my sincere apologies. Rereading my post I now see where my “outrage” is clear and my comments clearly were out of line.
I appreciate your concern for my health but i’m doing fine thanks.

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SWCA #1917

Does the NFL have a draft for arm-chair quarterbacks?

There is nothing like a real life experience to test your response. You can't duplicate the stress and rush in training that you get in a real life situation. You handled the event well, but I'm sure if it happens again you will have your weapon in hand when you investigate. However, I've been on many calls were a drunk entered the wrong house; no malicious intent just bad judgement. Not one of these incidents involved a shooting so no one had to live with having shot someone for making a mistake. Keep a cool head.

WOW. Now that's a rough night. Glad everything turned out the way it did, you and your family safe, no numerous court appearances, legal fees, etc. and the bad guy goes back where he belongs. Sounds right to me.

I'm glad that you and your family are all safe and sound. We had an elderly neighbor robbed in his apartment one floor below me when the guy knocked and said he was with the cable company. The elderly man opened the door and the guy put a gun in his face and told him to take him to the safe. The man had just moved in and had his cable installed, so we think it was the guy that installed it or someone he knew since he knew the man had a safe. The man yelled for help and the guy hit him in the face and took his wallet and ran. Now I check our garage and exterior security access doors each night while carrying a pistol on me.

Well, all that stinks to high heaven! I can see the management company passing on the charges, especially if they are CA based. But I am flabbergasted that the Police Dept charges for answering 911 calls. Never heard of such! Not doubting your words at all, Sir, but the Police should be fully funded from taxpayers dollars so somebody is getting double charged. Not every reasonably suspicious call for help results in nor deserves an arrest! Like I said, I just think that policy stinks all the way around. Knowing that, I wouldn't choose to live either in that town or in that apartment complex if I could help it!

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So long ... Ken

I agree with all the comments re: Monday Morning Quarterbacking.
Learn from this incident and move forward.

For my part, this is a lesson to me that at my age I have to be properly armed if I get up to investigate something suspicious.

It reminds me of the scene from The Godfather where Michael is preparing to deal with the guys who set up the ambush on his father.

Sonny Corleone tells one of his henchmen something like
"Make sure you get the gun in there!
I don't want my brother to come out of the john with nothing but a stick in his hand!"

Ok, that's the cleaned up version.

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You're shy a few manners.

About three months ago my house was broken into while I was present. It was an eye-opening experience. Despite having tried to plan out what I would do in such a situation, when the time came I did none of the things I thought I would do. Most of these plans were built around the use of firearms. My assumption was that were someone to break into my house, my dogs would give me enough warning for me get to the loaded pistol in the gun safe. However, when actually faced with someone in the house I found myself with little warning and no access to a gun. I then proceeded to make a series of astonishingly bad decisions, each of which could have made the situation much worse.

I got lucky. No one was hurt and I got my property back, but I have fundamentally rethought my home security situation.


The Events:

It was about 9:45 on a Monday night. My wife had just gone to bed. I was in the family room reading. My dogs were with me in the family room, which is adjacent to our back door/mudroom.

I heard the flap on the outside dog door move. Because there is a lot of dog traffic through that door, I thought nothing of it. But my rat terrier knew better. She looked up, did a quick check around the room and realized that all the dogs were accounted for. She made the chuffing sound that outraged rat terriers make and went crashing through the inner dog door and into the dark mudroom. I followed as far the door to the mudroom.

I looked through the glass in the mudroom door and saw a dark shape on the floor, which I concluded was a raccoon or an opossum. Then the shape stood up and I was forced to abandon the raccoon hypothesis. At this point my brain seems to have been trying mightily to come up with a “normal” explanation of what was going on. Thus I found myself wondering, “Why did my adult son just come through the dog door? Did he loose his key?”

After a fraction of a second I stopped clutching at that straw and reluctantly conceded that there was someone in my house who was not supposed to be there.

At that point I probably should have locked the door between the family room and the mudroom and retreated to the bedroom, the phone, and the gun safe. I also should have hit the lights in the mudroom and backyard.

Instead, I started yelling in a voice that I did not know I had. It was deep and guttural and in retrospect I recognize it as the voice that high school football players use when they are trying to convince their opponents (and themselves) that they are tough guys.

The intruder reached for a shelf and grabbed a set of car keys. Then he turned away from me, hunched over, and spun back to face me while pantomiming pushing out a gun.

Something in my subconscious told me he did not have a gun, so I continued to stand there and yell at him through the glass door.

After another second or so he got tired of my yelling and the terrier biting his ankles and he bolted out the back door with the dog in hot pursuit.

Once again, I could have retreated to the bedroom. Instead, probably because I did not want to be shown up by a twelve-pound dog, I charged out the door (leaving it wide open) and into the backyard. It was so dark that I could not see a thing, so I went back into the house, turned on the outside lights and headed out again. I came out just in time to see him fleeing across the driveway.

Thinking it would encourage him to keep going, I started yelling at him. To my surprise, it had the opposite effect. He turned around and came toward me. He ran to within about ten feet of me, reached for his waistband and again pantomimed drawing a gun. At this point it did cross my mind that he might have picked up a gun he had stashed outside, but for whatever reason, I stood my ground and kept yelling. This did not discourage him. He came towards me and began to climb over the low fence of the dog pen that separated us.

We were nearly nose-to-nose when my wife appeared in the doorway holding her phone in both hands. She was trying to call the police, but I think he saw an object held in both hands, read it as a gun, and took off like a scalded dog.

My wife then said something to the effect of “Get back in the house you idiot!”

So I did.

We locked up the house and called the police. The intruder went off and broke into another house a couple of blocks away, where he assaulted the homeowner in his kitchen and then hid under a bed for a while before running off again. The police caught him around midnight and I got my car keys back a couple of days later.


What I Learned:

First, a gun in the gun safe, even a loaded gun in the gun safe, is pretty much the same as no gun at all. I had always thought the concept of home carry was absurd, but I no longer feel that way. I was so focused on my intruder that I doubt that I would have taken my eyes off him long enough to even reach into an unlocked drawer for a gun, much less mess around with the safe. I have also realized that I would not want to be in race to the gun safe and have someone catch up just as I opened the safe. I now have a .380 on me virtually all the time. It’s no more inconvenient than a wallet or a phone and as a bonus I don’t have to make a conscious decision to take it with me when I leave the house.

Second, an actual intruder in your house is totally different than training at the range. That may sound blindingly obvious, but I now realize just how different it is. There is a decision making process that occurs in an actual event that is entirely absent at the range. We would all know exactly what to do if our opponent appeared before us wearing an IDPA target and a shot timer went off. But the process of figuring out what’s going on, filtering out the bizarre explanations your brain offers you (raccoons, etc.), and then deciding what to do about it is far more complex than what happens on a range. I can only imagine that the decision making process is even more protracted and difficult if you are half asleep.

Third, you can make plans, but people are too unpredictable for you to imagine every possible boneheaded thing they might do. My guy decided to break into a house with the interior lights on and several cars in the driveway at a time of night when most people are still awake. He entered through a dog door. You would think that someone might expect to find humans in a house with lights on and cars in the drive and dogs in a house with a dog door. People don’t get into the house breaking business because they are geniuses, which makes it difficult to game out the types of choices they will make and to guard against them.

Fourth, I used to be pretty cavalier about gun hygiene. Once my wife got me back in the house I went straight to the gun safe. Then I realized that I could not remember if I had cleaned the GLOCK that been a little balky about going into battery after I put some dirty handloads though it. I selected a revolver instead, but I had to waste time thinking about it. I now make sure that any gun that might play a defensive role is not just loaded, but clean.

Fifth, dogs are not as dependable a source of warning when someone breaks in or support once a threat is identified as I had expected. Of my five dogs, only the rat terrier noticed that something was wrong and took action. The other (much bigger dogs) could not be bothered to get out of their beds to investigate. When the cops came and knocked at the door, all five of them went crazy. I was ready to react to the familiar sound of the shot timer; the dogs were ready for the familiar sound of knocking, but less inclined to react to the sound of the sound of the dog door.

Sixth, I have rethought what I consider a good home defense gun. My default gun was always a GLOCK 22. But I was far closer to my intruder than I would have thought possible. I was easily in contact shot and struggle-for-control-of-the-gun range. I am increasingly thinking that a K-, L- or N-frame snub-nosed revolver might be the best choice (at least for a single intruder). It won’t go out of battery if it’s in contact with the target, the short barrel does not offer much for another person to hold on to, and a three-pound, steel revolver makes a better club than a polymer pistol. But any gun you have with you is better than the perfect gun in the safe.

And finally, I have learned never to underestimate my rat terrier. She is one badass little dog.

Phew, this one was way more frightening than the original post. Glad you lived to tell the tale. Joe

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Wisdom chases me; I'm faster

Well done! Glad you didn't have to shoot him, you handled that situation perfectly. Also, great response time from your local law enforcement. Our nearest trooper barracks is half an hour away.

It sounds like you learned a lot.
Your wife is a very smart lady.
Thank God all is well.

Nothing is more realistic than doing an "after action report".
You soon "see" where you could have done things better and possibly safer.

But, YOU DID GOOD, real good, on this house invasion.

I commend you on your response.

This Commendation is included in your "201" file. Sincerely, CHIEF.

Glad everything turned out good for you.

One thing you might want to consider though is if the guy wasn't crazy and he came at you, what would you have done since all of your tools were in another room?

I don't know if he was crazy, but I think meth was involved. He was sweating profusely and had prior convictions for cocaine, meth and armed robbery.

I have no idea what I would have done had he climbed back over the fence. Maybe my high school wrestling skills would have kick in, but probably not. That was a while back.

Not my dog!

JMO, I would not take advice on Lethal Force or Self Defence from my tax attorney, even though she is sorta my seventh kid, or advice on taxes from the best criminal defence attorney in the state.

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Certified Curmudgeon

Well done!



You know, I was busy typing out "criminal attorney", and then I thought, "No, I'm just gonna put 'lawyer' and troll the hell out of whoever decides to Well-Actually that post, because somebody will."

These are a couple of frightening stories, and to think my wife makes fun of me because I grab my handgun every time I hear a strange noise around the house. So far I haven't needed it, but I sure would hate to need it and have left it in the bedroom.

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Or something like that . . .