Tennessee resident and mother of a young son, Elsie Lee, woke up on a Monday morning due to a strange noise in her house.
“I thought I was just dreaming something,” Lee told a local TV station, “and then I heard a big bang again.”
Quickly realizing something was not right, she told the TV network she “got up and came running through the hallway” and “the guy was standing in the kitchen. He had just busted my door open.”
The station reported the home invader’s accomplices were outside Lee’s Madison County home.
According to Lee’s statement to the news station, her only thought was to protect her son. So she grabbed her shotgun and .45-caliber handgun.
After approaching the intruder, Lee asked him an important question.
“I put the gun in his face and asked him if there was something I could do for him,” she told the local news station. What happened next surprised everyone.
“He was gone just that quick,” Lee told the station. “I chased him out the back door trying to look at the tag number on the car, something I could describe other than just him.”
In less than an hour, the Sheriff’s deputies arrested Jaylon Chiles, 18, Quentin Childress, 20, Amar Johnson, 21, Kendrick McMullin, 19, and another juvenile male. The news station reported that all of the suspects have been charged with aggravated burglary and were scheduled to make their first court appearance on Thursday morning.
Lee was full of praise for the local law enforcement.
“I say they were ‘Johnny on the spot,’” she told the station. “They were here within three minutes. I congratulate our sheriff’s department for what they did, and it couldn’t have been done any faster or better.”
Although Lee doesn’t believe the intruder was armed, she did say that she definitely knows what would’ve happened if he had decided to stay in her home a little longer.
“I almost killed him,” she told the station. “One of them could have been dead. Had he not ran, he would have been dead.”
