Scared at first, now I'm TERRIFIED!

"Akeen Cromartie & Marcus Ivey." These are the names of the two men that tried to break into one of our good friends house, in our neighborhood today, WHILE she was home alone and in the shower. She is a great friend of my Mom's and a fellow Bunko girl. Not to mention one of the nicest ladies you will EVER meet. This incident is the SECOND time their home has been broken into, and their vehicle was broken into shortly after mine.

There has been a ton of criminal activity on the NW side of town recently including car breakins and home invasions, many of them happening in our neighborhood.

This morning, Mrs. M I'll call her had just said goodbye to her husband and kids for the day and was taking a shower when she heard her dog going crazy in the house. She said she knew it was a different kind of growl, one that only meant something serious was happening. As she was trying to figure out what the dog was growling at, she then heard someone trying to kick in the door leading into her house from her garage. Keep in mind the garage was open with her car in it...clearly they could tell someone was home. So she quickly threw on her bath robe, grabbed her tennis shoes and a big pipe that they kept under their bed for safety. As she was walking out of her room to still try and see what was going on, she saw the first guy, straight on and he saw her. He ran one way and she ran the other, to the phone to call 911. As she was running to the phone she noticed the other guy trying to break in to her sliding glass doors on the back of the house. She gets on the phone with 911, her dog's going crazy at the door, and the guy is STILL trying to break in. The 911 operator tells her to go and hide, lock herself up and stay put until the cops arrived because she had no way out, they were trying to get in both doors. She said she was BEYOND terrified, and trying to put on her tennies in her daughters closet in case she needed to RUN. As she's hiding in the closet, the guy was STILL trying to come in the back door. Somehow she got through it and the guy I guess gave up, and the cops arrived just as the getaway car was leaving. (one that i might add was a suspect car in a previous home invasion in our neighborhood.)

Sheriffs were already closed to our neighborhood because they had just been doing their usual patrolling that they had recently started. As the getaway car was coming to the neighborhood exit, the sheriff blocked the road and then the suspects went around them and got out of the neighborhood but another nearby sheriff was in quick pursuit. They ended up stopping the one car and arresting the guy, and the other was caught by a K9 unit not much long after. Mrs. M made a positive ID on one of them later in the afternoon.

I don't really know why I felt compelled to share this entire story, but just knowing that it could have been me, completely terrifies me. I absolutely cannot imagine what I would have done in her situation. It makes me shudder to think about it. But like Mrs. M said, for such a bad situation, it couldn't have turned out better. No one was hurt, and the bad guys were caught. Thankfully they were not minors, so hopefully they will remain in jail for a long, long time.

Please pray for Mrs. M and her family. She is such a strong woman and I hate that this happened to her. She is so much stronger than I am and would have been.

Please stay safe my friends.

PS- Here's the link to read the news report. They were both charged with armed burglary. http://www.wctv.tv/home/headlines/43818782.html