How would - or did - you react (burglary)???
Has anyone been the victim of a burglary/break-in while you were at home? What went through your head? How did you react and what did you do? How did it make you feel, etc.? [I can only imagine how frightening this would be...]
Anyone else...if you woke up to the sound of breaking glass or a door being kicked in, etc. or just thought an intruder was in your residence --- what goes through your mind and what would you do?
I'm interested in your personal feelings on this and not necessarily what you think you should do, etc.
THANK YOU!!!
Yes, yes indeed. What went through my head was a product of curiosity and puzzlement. But in order to understand why, here’s the whole story, or at least as much as I’ll tell…
I was in college, staying at my folk’s house one summer, and while they were overseas, my cousin -- we’ll call her Harriet -- wanted to drop by on her day off from work and make use of the pool. She was in her twenties, blonde, and newly buxomed from the addition of some aftermarket accessories. So I said, okay, sure, come on over. I’ll just be sitting out on the back porch studying.
She came over in her new blue bikini (this is important, by the way), a towel over one shoulder. She had walked, living no more than a block away in the quiet little suburb, and we chitchatted a bit, then she hopped in the pool to float around on an air mattress. I, meanwhile, ventured into the kitchen to slice up a watermelon to snack upon, leaving half the melon and the big carving knife on the kitchen counter (this is important, too, by the way). Outside again, we shared the watermelon. I read a little.
Then the back door opened -- it was one of those sliding glass doors -- and this big fellow was standing there in a pair of shorts and shoes, looking around. I thought that was odd because I didn’t recognize him, but I also fully expected my brother in law to have brought the fellow over, and probably to use the pool, too. In those days, brother in law would often stop by unexpectedly to chat, sometimes bringing a buddy, so my initial reaction was this: well, brother in law -- we’ll call him Skippy -- is probably here, too, and Skippy will probably materialize any moment. That didn’t happen. Instead, this stranger we’ll call Goon, stared at cousin Harriet, who was lounging in the pool and staring back at him through sunglasses.
I asked Goon, “Who are you, and are you here with anyone that I know?” Naturally, I expected that he’d introduce himself and say that he was here with Skippy. Instead, he stared at cousin Harriet.
By then the this-ain’t-right vibe that occurred before he even opened that back door was getting louder. Goon spat a blob of tobacco juice on the back porch. That was devilishly impolite, and not the sort of thing any of Skippy’s friends would do. Clearly Skippy wasn’t here. This guy had showed up all on his own. I put my book down and stood up. Goon looked at me. I asked him, “What are you here for?”
Goon looked at newly buxomed Harriet in her bright blue bikini and said to her, “You know what I’m here for.”
At the time, that made utterly no sense to me. (And if you can’t guess by now, I’ll tell you later.) I told Goon, “I think you’d better leave.”
Goon, a taller, heavier guy than myself, stepped out of the open doorway, off the back step, onto the patio, and toward me. My eyes went to his hands, the waistline of his shorts, his pockets, looking for anything that might indicate a weapon of some sort. Nothing obvious showed, and while that bad vibe was telling me quite clearly that this fellow was here for no good purpose, another part of me was trying to rationalize his presence. He reached up with his right hand toward my left shoulder. I pushed his hand away and told him not to do that. He stepped closer and tried again. I backstepped and said, “Don’t try to touch me.”
Oh but he kept moving toward me. So there’s there a tree nearby, a fruitless Mulberry, as it turns out, and a pretty big one. While he keeps advancing, I tell him five times, “Go away. I’m going to call the police. You should leave before they arrive.” While doing this, I maneuver to not only get the tree between the two of us, but to put myself closer to the still-open back door than he is. Once I’m in position, I tell him once more that I’m going to call police and that I recommend he leave before they arrive.
Inside, I no sooner grab the phone off the kitchen wall than I see the Goon coming in the back door. I turn toward him. On my right, there’s a long kitchen table and some chairs, no easy escape that direction, and on my left, there’s a kitchen counter with half a watermelon on it and, yes, that big carving knife. There’s also a blank expression on Goon’s face, and in an instant I’m thinking of how I’m boxed in, there’s a big knife within reach that I don’t want this guy to grab, that look on his face is all bad business, and the phone in my hand upon which I have just dialed 911 is abso-frikkin-lutely useless.
So Goon steps across my only easy escape route and I tell him quite firmly, “Do not approach me.”
This was good advice.
But Goon’s hands came up in what looked to me like a close, clinch, grapple attitude, and all that vibe telling me that he was here with bad intentions suddenly penetrated my thick skull, and everything my instructors had ever told me about people’s last thoughts being, “I can’t believe this is happening to me,” made a buncha sense.
When I realized that, yep, this bastard wasn’t going to listen to good advice and, yep, he was really here to do bad things, my very next thought was: Sorry, but this is going to hurt.
I leaped forward just as he closed, smashing the middle of his face with a straight right. His head popped back like it was hinged, and a very curious thing happened to his eyeballs. They just went white. His eyelids came down halfway and fibrillated like windowshades in a cyclone. I thought, Well, he’s gonna be mad about that, so I’d better make sure he doesn’t get back up. See, he was sagging after that first shot, but I cracked him over the left temple with my right elbow. His head slammed left and a stream of blood spouted out of his ear. I remember that distinctly. Then I cracked him on the right temple with a left hook. Another stream of blood came out of that ear, and I remember that distinctly, too.
By this time my cousin Harriet had come into the house and although I was vaguely aware of her, I saw almost nothing else except this Goon. He was still on his way down, but I caught him in a front choke and hit him with six skip knees, working my way up from groin to solar plexus as he kept falling. One the ground, I squeezed the choke as hard as I could and all of the blood squirting out of his ears, nose, and mouth stopped like a faucet turned off.
Goon reached up toward my face with a hand, going for eyeballs. I considered biting that hand as hard as I could and holding on tight, but in case his blood was full of infectious crap, I didn’t want any of it in my mouth. I also thought of rolling him to crack his neck, but figured a clever lawyer could find a way to sue the hell out of me, and right about then I saw his other hand in a perfect gooseneck, elbow on floor, forearm upright, hand slack, and momentarily though of hammer-fisting that one to break it. But I was still in nice-guy mode (this is important later).
Somewhere in the midst is this tussle, probably when we first hit the ground, I noticed that Goon had the telephone in hand, the cord wrapped all around his hand and forearm. How he got it I have no idea, because at the moment he closed, that phone was the least important thing in the world. I forgot all about it.
But back to the tussle. See, I thought that this guy was going to die if I kept beating him like I was, so I had hit him less vigorously with those knees than I should have. And then I thought he was going to die if I held that choke too long, so I let him go. These notions of being kind to bad guys is a bad idea. See, after I let go of the choke, the guy put one on me.
Right about then I heard my cousin shouting to someone (I found out later she had somehow gotten hold of the phone), “They’re on the ground! They’re fighting!”
I slipped the guy’s choke before he locked it in and though that I should, a) break the arm he had handily given me, b) go ahead and shear off his noggin. But I was still in nice-guy mode, so I pushed away and noticed that cousin Harriet was gone. I exited the back door. She wasn’t there. I stepped around the corner of the house. She wasn’t there.
Out front, I noticed the garage door was open, the inner door from garage to house was open, and she was gone. Wherever she went, I had no idea.
I went next door to a neighbor’s house and asked her to call police. Turns out they showed up surprisingly fast, having already been alerted to Goon’s presence in the neighborhood. Another neighbor next door told me later she had seen the Goon stagger outside and fall into a lounge chair, blood all over his head and face. Two cops found him back there, he staggered up, and it took two of them to put him on the ground. She said that when they flipped him over after handcuffing him, his head was in a big puddle of his own blood.
My brother showed up while I was still at the police-calling neighbor’s place and saw an ambulance out front, lots of police cars, and said that the EMTs had the Goon’s head so bandaged he looked like a Q-tip.
I was later told that the Goon became combative at the hospital and that it took four cops to restrain him, he had a concussion, some messed up dental work, and other injuries.
Found out at the pre-trial hearing that he’d been discharged from the Marines after six years and had just gotten out of prison after a two-year visit. He was charged with second-degree burglary. Speculation had it that he’d seen my cousin walking over for a pool visit in her bikini, he’d followed her, and his statement to her, “You know what I’m here for,” meant that he’d shown up to rape her and that I was just an obstacle in his way.
Who knows.
What I do know is that lots of furniture got rearranged during the fracas and I have no memory of any of it ever being touched. At least not by me. I also know that I was covered with the guy’s blood and didn’t even know it till one of the policemen on scene asked me to turn around to check for wounds (I was wearing only swim trunks at the time of this little episode). I also know that I was cleaning blood out of the carpet, off the furniture and bookcases and telephone and walls for about a couple weeks after. One thing my instructors had never mentioned was how much people would bleed, and how it would go all over the place, as long as you kept hitting them. Kinda silly to never think about that. (My only experience with blood during training was seeing my own.)
Ah, one more thing. Guy went to jail for six months. About another six months after that, I read that he’d assaulted two fishermen on a local river.
Okay, one more thing, too: If I ever do this sort of thing again, no more kindness.
So, after that long and boring and largely off-the-top-of-my-head recollection, how did it make me feel?
My initial reaction was simply one of moderate anxiety, simply because I didn’t know who the fellow was or what he was up to.
When it became plain that he was bent on violence, my only feeling was one of disappointment. He had chosen badly and it was going to hurt him. I had really hoped he’d just go away.
Was I frightened? No. Not really. My anxiety was simply a contest between not knowing what he was up to, feeling that vibe that he was up to no good, and trying to think of peaceful, rational reasons for why he was there. In other words, there was friction between wanting to rationalize the guy’s presence and that vibe that said danger.
For a few months afterward, though, I didn’t like strangers getting too close to me, and I sure as heck didn’t like them making any sudden moves too close to me, either.
Sorry for the unedited ramble. Hope it answers your questions.
I don't live in fear of this happening but there are people out there who have no qualms about taking your life for a few hundred dollars AND there are sociopathic lunatics out there who'd enjoy doing much worse than stealing your valuables. Please know I'm not trigger happy or anything....and I believe in responsible gun ownership. Live offensively! 
