Posted on 05/19/2014 6:55:18 AM PDT by heartwood
MIDDLETOWN, Ohio -- A Middletown mother's fear and anguish is heard in her 911 call as she and her children were terrorized by teens Tuesday night.
"They busted my front door! They're trying to kick my door in!" Jennifer Saylor screamed.
Saylor frantically told a dispatcher that a group of teens had broken into her house five times in the past and now they were throwing bricks and trying to kick in the door in the 2000 block of Roosevelt Road.
A day after the incident, Saylor told WCPO she feared the teens would kill her and her two kids, ages 4 months and 4 years.
A few hours after the teens tried to break in, somebody set fire to Saylor's house and destroyed it. Police have charged a 17-year-old with arson.
Here is a partial transcript of the 911 call:
DISPATCHER: I can't hear. Ma'am. Ma'am, you need to stop yelling. I can't hear you.
SAYLOR: They busted my front door. They're trying to kick my door in.
DISPATCHER: What is your address?
SAYLOR: Roosevelt Boulevard. They're trying to shoot my house and everything.
DISPATCHER: OK. Who is it?
SAYLOR: Some kids I called the police on for breaking into my house and they've been trying to …
DISPATCHER: Are they kicking at your door? Answer my questions. Are they there right now?
SAYLOR: Yes. They're outside my door. Please come now …
DISPATCHER: Ma'am. Ma'am, you have to stop screaming. I can't help you until you stop screaming. --
Saylor and her two children fled through a back window after the confrontation, at about 10 p.m.
At 1:15 Wednesday morning, someone torched Saylor's home. Middletown police say the fire was in retaliation because Saylor reported the previous break-ins.
The break-ins started last Thanksgiving, Saylor said.
(Excerpt) Read more at wcpo.com ...
There seems to be this reflexive fear that if someone is breaking in they are going to be this overwhelming and unstoppable force, therefore, the only thing left to do is completely panic and hide in a corner to await your fate.
Too many horror movies.
As someone noted, after the first incident you need to arm yourself. You hear people breaking your windows and kicking down your door? That's the time you want to go full retard with multiple mags as necessary.
“a nice 20 gauge pump”
“youth” sized
The dispatcher was a woman, and I don’t think she was black.
I am going by voices and names here to attribute race - other articles have more names - race is not mentioned explicitly.
I do want to mention one possibility, suggested by the attitude of the dispatcher and the low key reaction of the police - they took a report after the flare and brick attack on the house. That is that the woman is a hysteric and a fabricator and she burned her own house before she left. Such fakery is not unknown among black or white. Except that the police are still holding one “teen” for arson.
Of course, if all the attacks and break-ins were occurred exactly as she said, the police could still see her as a trouble-maker, a victim nucleus for crime, someone who should simply get out of Dodge.
A 12-gauge pump with 3-inch magnum 00-buck loads would solve the problem permanently.
“Roosevelt Road”
Problem is obvious right there.
If you are white, you don’t want to live any road, street, etc., named Roosevelt, MLK, Bedford, or Forrest.
The problem is that with guns in the home, particularly a home with children (young, male children in particular), you have to lock up the guns.
I have several pistols and a rifle. They are always locked up. I have them loaded, but that are in a secure locked area under pad lock and I have the key. I don’t even want my children to know that I have them as they are gun crazy like so many young children. This limits the ability to protect yourself.
I have had need in the past to quickly get my pistol when I thought I heard an intruder at the door at night. I had to get out of bed, go downstairs to my office, right next to the back door. Open the pad lock and get my pistol. Had I not had children in the home I would keep a pistol in the bedside table. That is not a real option with kids around.
In this instance, however, she had lots of time to call the police and that time would have been better spent getting her shot gun or pistol from it’s hiding place and aiming it at the perpetrators while she was on the phone.
BTW, the ‘intruder’ was a raccoon. We are loaded with raccoon and skunks in my urban area. We have an extensive Metro Parks system and one of the parks is only blocks from the house. We also get our odd lost deer roaming around the 40 X 140 lots.
I have a 4595TS. Larger rounds, more effective, same low price. Magazine holds only 1 round fewer.
Totally unnecessary even with kids in the house.
I have one of these bolted to my nightstand.
Every night I punch in the code before turning the light off, every morning I close it up.
We have grand kids running around the house and security is never an issue - but the weapon is close to hand and ready if needed.
That dispatcher and those cops are lucky. If those two children had been killed it would have been their fault. I am sure that is why the woman was hysterical. You can’t send a four year old out the back door with a 4 month old.
A better response to the dispatcher was that after describing the attackers, she should claim that they have guns “and I already shot at two of them, though I don’t know if I hit them!”
This would push several hot buttons and likely get a faster response. Plus the police would arrive with an attitude, so if any of the vermin resisted, they might very well get shot.
How old are they?
I started my boys shooting firearms at about age 8. If they want to shoot, we go out and shoot. It really takes the mystery out of firearms and teaches them about their destructive nature.
If I left a weapon out, my 12 year old would either ignore it or safety check it and put it away. My 16 year old would raz me about my unsafe behaviour.
I came up with a simple way to keep ammo and tool separated but easy to bring together on short notice. There is peel and stick Velcro attachment tape. Apply the felt side to the back of a five or six shotgun round section of a shotgun bandolier piece and the hook side to the buttstock of the shotgun. Keep the strip of shotgun rounds in a separate location from the tool and slap that strip on the buttstock and load the tool with it. Not as quick as keeping the tool loaded, but quicker than finding a key, fumbling with a lock, then loading a tool. In a panic, fine motor skills tend to diminish precipitously. The hook and loop Velcro system does not require careful handing of the strip of rounds since any connection will hold the strip for taking orunds out and loading the tool.
IIRC, the 1911 extended mags will work in the HiPoint 4595 with only very minor filing work.
A couple of potential solutions:
1. There are several good and reliable desktop pistol safes available which use cypher locks to keep your weapon secured. These small safes can be securely bolted to table tops and make pistols instantly available while protecting accidental handling by children.
2. Some pistols lend themselves to safe handling even when kept available. I used to use a Browning 9mm Hi-Power for home protection - it has a good magazine safety which allowed the weapon kept nearby but it cannot be operated without a magazine. I would keep the Browning on top of the fridge and a loaded magazine in my pocket.
Excellent. The use of a magazine for feeding ammo lends itself to home management in just that way. I developed my system for someone who had a double barrel twenty gauge they want to use for home defense but had a small boy in the house at the time. I even bought a couple of those rubber stripper ammo holders and cut them into two round sections, so two rounds at a time could be shuffled from the ammo holder at each end of the velcroed strip.
but in anycase, it all works much better when the caller is speaking calmly... she may not be calm... she may be scared to death, but taking a deep breath and being collected is much better... and i know this from personal experience... whether the dispatcher was black, white, male or female, he/she would ask the caller to calm down...
the caller did not give her specific address... just the street... once the thugs left, she told the dispatcher they did not have to come just now... that is nuts...
i wondered myself if she torched the house...
Nice. Thanks for the link.
Can you fit an 870 in that?
i can see saying that she was shot at... but to say she shot at them could put her in a dangerous situation with the officers... especially these days...
The part about “calming down”, yes I was being funny.
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