A Vent...

[Rusty Ray]

Glad you're both OK. It sounds to me like you did exactly the right thing.

It turns out that no, I didn't, and that I'm a moron. I mentioned the episode to some guys at work, and one of them asked, why didn't you just go around the back of the house and in the back door.... Duh. My house has a back door, but I hardly ever use it, and it didn't occur to me the whole time to go that way. Told my wife that if something like that ever happens again, to please remind me that our house has a back door... And she said it never occurred to her, either. It's just annoying that I had another option to get into the house where she was besides wrestling with some drunk guy at the front door. Talk about tunnel vision.

Not that what I did was necessarily bad, or that she was defenseless (not hardly), but I was sitting in the garage when I could just as easily have been sitting in the house with her.

Huh? How is flanking your enemy (thus taking them from an angle they don't expect) a mistake? Your wife was safe inside. You were on the home turf, had all the advantages and sounds as though you could have dealt with the situation should it have gotten nasty. Maybe I am missing something here, but to me you did 'a' right thing AFIAC. Glad you are all safe and well.

Cheers- Rusty

[Frankingun]

Or he could have come around to the back yard at the same time you were crossing to the back door of the house.

So, did this dude break your window or just make some noise?

[Darrell]

Or he could have come around to the back yard at the same time you were crossing to the back door of the house.

So, did this dude break your window or just make some noise?

A drunk here in the Springs got shot like that a year or so ago. He'd just moved to the neighborhood, staggered home drunk, and tried to get into the wrong house. The terrified residents shot him dead, and it was ruled as justified under Make My Day.

[Netpackrat]

Or he could have come around to the back yard at the same time you were crossing to the back door of the house.

So, did this dude break your window or just make some noise?

That possibility did occur to me later as I was considering that I should have used the back door. If I were going to do that, the time to do it would have been before I went back into the garage, and just go straight around the back of the house. Otherwise, he could have been waiting right by the man door to the garage when I opened it back up. Which I ended up doing anyway, but it isn't like I was empty handed or anything. The first priority in my head at that time, was making the phone call to the cops, and being able to do it undistracted from a position of relative safety. But it wouldn't have taken much longer to go through the back of the house, and do it from in there.

And no, he didn't damage anything, just made some noise. Sounds like he may have been past the point of being truly dangerous, having already taken a beating, and being drunk out of his mind. But I didn't have any way of knowing that.