Washington: Marjorie Perkins, 87, was fast asleep at home alone when she awoke to a male intruder looming over her bed, threatening to attack her.
“He said: ‘I’m going to cut you,’” Perkins, a former elementary school teacher living in Brunswick, Maine, told local outlet the “Times Record” of the attack.
“I thought to myself: ‘If he’s going to cut, I’m going to kick’. So I jumped into my shoes.
“He grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me against the wall and so forth,” she said in a separate interview. She grabbed a nearby chair, she said, “and I kept hitting him.”
“I was hollering for help out the window,” she said, but no one heard her.
“He kept punching me and pushing me,” she said, leaving her with a bruised forehead.
Then, he seemingly tired and made for the kitchen, where she offered him a snack.
“I kept saying: ‘You need to get out. You need help.’ He said he was awfully hungry and hadn’t had anything to eat for quite a while. And I said: ‘Well, here’s a box of peanut butter and honey crackers. You can have that whole box.’ I gave him two containers of Ensure and I gave him two tangerines.”
While he was eating, she dialled 911 on her rotary phone. The intruder left her home before authorities arrived, but a police dog tracked him down and took him into custody.
Perkins said she recognised the intruder as someone who mowed her lawn when he was a kid 10 years ago, and estimated him to be 17 years old.
“He did a darn good job,” Perkins said of his mowing. “I hope he gets help.”
Brunswick police confirmed the attack, saying the intruder faced charges for burglary, criminal threatening, assault and consuming liquor as a minor.
Perkins said she believed the intruder entered her home by shifting an air-conditioning unit near a window to break in.
But she said she didn’t want any sympathy: “Don’t sit and cry about it.” - The Washington Post
The Independent on Saturday