Firearms Owners Against Crime
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An elderly Commerce woman called 911 for help and held off an intruder in her home Tuesday by firing pistols in his direction, authorities said.
“She shot the first time with a .32 (caliber) and then she shot the second time with a .357,” Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said Thursday.
Though frightened, two women in the farmhouse were not harmed, Mangum said.
Deputies arrived and arrested the 20-year-old man in an upstairs room, according to the sheriff’s report.
The incident began shortly after noon when the woman heard someone trying to raise a window, according to the report.
“She gets her gun and goes to the back door and peeps out the blinds and he is standing there,” Mangum said.
“She told him in words I can’t tell you that he better not come in her house or she’d take care of things,” the sheriff said.
The woman backed up and fired a shot from the kitchen area, according to the sheriff. Then she heard glass breaking upstairs, Mangum said.
The house has an upstairs room with a stairwell on the outside leading to that room. The intruder had gone up the stairs and broke the window in a door and gained entrance to the room. Then he began to make his way down an indoors stairwell, according to the sheriff’s report.
“As he started down the stairs, she fired toward the stairs and he went back up,” Mangum said.
About this time, deputies arrived and took Hans Edward Rogers, 20, of the Powder Springs area into custody without incident, Mangum said. He is charged with burglary and home invasion.
Investigators learned that Rogers had left his home the day before in his mother’s car, which ran out of gas near the Georgia Highway 82 Spur on Interstate 85 in Jackson County.
Rogers is alleged to have abandoned the car on the interstate and made his way about a half mile to the victim’s home.
“I don’t know what would have happened if she didn’t fire the gun,” Mangum said.
Rogers was not armed, the sheriff said. The suspect remained in the Jackson County Jail on Thursday without bond.
https://www.onlineathens.com/news/20190214/commerce-woman-shoots-at-intruder-suspect-nabbed-in-house