A Georgia woman’s clear thinking and willingness to use a firearm put a home intruder into the hospital and likely saved her and her two children from harm. The unidentified woman and her nine-year-old twins were in their home in Loganville, in north central Georgia, when she heard the doorbell ring. Moments later she spotted a man with a crowbar at a window of the home. Grabbing her children, a phone, and her .38 revolver, the woman retreated to an upstairs crawlspace, where she and her children soon heard the man break into the house.
It wasn’t long before the intruder, later identified as 32-year-old career criminal Paul Slater, found the three. But he wasn’t prepared for the protective mother’s response. “The perpetrator opens that door,” Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman told local WSB television news. “Of course, at that time he’s staring at her, her two children, and a .38 revolver.”
Without hesitation, the woman squeezed off all six shots, hitting Slater five times. While the wounds didn’t kill Slater, they stopped him from proceeding with his criminal intent. While the mother had run out of bullets, she bluffed the intruder, now in tears on the floor, threatening to shoot him again if he moved. “She’s standing over him, and she realizes she’s fired all six rounds,” Chapman told a WSB reporter. But “the guy’s telling her to quit shooting.”
The woman grabbed her children and fled to a neighbor’s house, while criminal Slater tried to get away in his car, ultimately crashing it in a nearby woods and collapsing nearby before being apprehended. Chapman said they found him on the ground pleading, “Help me. I’m close to dying.” Slater was taken to a nearby hospital in critical condition, with punctured lungs, a punctured liver, and other wounds in keeping with being shot five times. Police said that he had an arrest record going back to at least 2008.
The woman’s husband, who was not at home at the time of the break-in, called his wife a hero who was equipped with the right tool for the crisis at hand. “She protected her kids. She did what she was supposed to do as a responsible, prepared gun owner.”
Sheriff Chapman concurred, telling the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that her “mother’s instinct kicked in. You go after a mother’s kids and she’ll find herself capable of doing things she never thought she was capable of.”
Georgia residents also endorsed the mother’s courageous actions. “God bless this woman,” one Georgian wrote on a news site. “She had the strength and courage to stand and protect her children and herself.”
Offered another Second Amendment-approving resident: “That is what I call gun control. Good job, lady. You are brave.”
