nwilliams
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Thought this story was worth sharing
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/Local News/Burglars-flee-hail-of-bullets
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/Local News/Burglars-flee-hail-of-bullets
Police search for suspects after woman fends off robbers with .44 Magnum
Jason Auslander | The New Mexican
4/22/2009 - 4/23/09
Lisa Gallegos was taking a bath Wednesday morning when she heard a knock at the front door of her Eldorado-area home.
Assuming the person would leave, the 41-year-old construction contractor ignored it. Then she saw a shadow move past her bathroom window. Thinking it might be her father-in-law, who lives nearby and sometimes brings over paperwork, Gallegos called him on her cell phone. However, he said he wasn't there. He offered to come over, but Gallegos said she wasn't worried.
Next she heard a car engine and thought the person at the door was leaving. But the shadow passed by her bathroom window again.
"Then I hear a big bang," Gallegos said in a phone interview Wednesday evening, "and I knew someone was breaking into my house."
She jumped out of the bathtub, wrapped herself in a towel and grabbed the loaded .44 Magnum revolver she keeps by her bed.
"I thought, 'Someone is robbing my house and I'm not going to let this happen,' " Gallegos said. "I work hard for my stuff."
Holding her towel with one hand and the gun in the other, Gallegos crept quietly to the area of the home where she could hear two people rummaging around. One man was in her daughter's bedroom, while the other was in her office. Gallegos concentrated first on the man in her daughter's room.
"So I pulled up the gun and aimed it at the guy — he didn't see me — and I said, 'Get the (expletive) out of my house,' " she said. "He looks up and he comes toward me running. I was about to pull the trigger, and he sees the gun, and he goes to my right and out the door he came in."
The man had parked his dark blue, late 1990s sport-utility vehicle in her home's courtyard, and she saw him slam one of the doors shut. Gallegos said she was afraid he was going to retrieve a weapon, so she fired a round at his car. The man jumped into the vehicle, spun the wheels and drove out of the courtyard.
Gallegos then turned her attention to the man in the office, who shut the door when he heard the gunshot. She said she could hear him trying to get out a window. She went outside and saw the man in the SUV driving around her home, so she fired three more shots at him.
The man in the office fled out the window, and Gallegos saw him running across a field toward the SUV. Gallegos fired one shot at him and watched him fall to the ground. The man then got back on his feet and jumped into the SUV, and the vehicle sped away.
"It was a quite a thing," said Gallegos, who is also a volunteer Eldorado firefighter and mother of two children. "It was kind of scary."
Gallegos got a partial New Mexico license plate number of the SUV — 011-D — and told detectives the men appeared to be in their 20s. She described the man in her daughter's bedroom as 5-foot-9, 180 pounds with dark hair, dark eyes, medium-colored skin, wearing a dark blue jacket and blue jeans, said Santa Fe County Undersheriff Robert Garcia. She only described the other man as wearing a light-colored shirt.
Gallegos said sheriff's investigators later told her she could have been arrested if she had shot one of the men while they were fleeing because they no longer represented a threat. Garcia confirmed that fact, but said that if she had shot the man as he ran toward her or when she thought he was going for a weapon, it would have been legal.
Gallegos said she was sure the man was trying to attack her when he ran at her and only veered away when he saw the gun.
"Had he gotten any closer, I was ready to shoot him," she said.
Investigators found no traces of blood outside the home on Mejor Lado, and figure the man who was in the office likely slipped on gravel when Gallegos saw him fall, Garcia said. Also, no one with gunshot wounds showed up at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center on Wednesday, he said.
"I'm really glad I didn't have to shoot somebody," Gallegos said. "But I was really ready to shoot the weapon. I didn't want to have to go hide in my bedroom and wait for them to come in there."
Garcia also said he was glad no one was hurt.
"These are two very lucky burglars," he said.
Still, Garcia worried that the increasing number of burglaries in the Santa Fe area could lead to future injuries.
"It could be that people are getting fed up with their houses being broken into," he said. "Hopefully no one will get hurt."
