When intruder visited, grandmother fired a warning shot

Debby was sleeping when her big boxer, Oliver, began whining about 3:30 a.m. Thursday.

She knew right away it was no “time to go out” whine, so she got out of bed to look around her Maricopa home.

Grabbing the loaded Ruger pistol inherited from her grandfather, she opened the door of her bedroom and entered the family room.

She peeked through the vertical blinds on the sliding door to the back patio before slowly sliding them back. Suddenly, she realized a shadowy figure was looking back at her, nearly face to face.

Debby, who asked that her last name not be used for this story, recounted the episode on Friday morning. She is a 67-year-old mother of eight and grandmother of 16. A self-described hippie, she said she is well-known by her neighbors as the cat lady on Rainbow Drive in Maricopa Meadows. She has 20 felines in addition to Oliver, perhaps not surprisingly for a former cat rescue operator in California who later promised her dying mother that she would care for her cats.

The gun in her hand, a relic of World War II, had been recently cleaned by one of her sons. She wasn’t nervous, she recalled, noting she began carrying a rifle at the age of four on hunting trips with her father, a Marine Corps drill sergeant.

As Debby looked at the shadow on the other side of the glass, she reached for the switch to turn on the patio light. His face now illuminated, she quickly surmised the blue-eyed man might be strung out on meth as she unlocked the door and slid it open.

Moving the gun through the doorway, she pulled the trigger as the intruder began to run, firing one shot into the patio.

She followed him across the patio, watching as he scampered across the backyard and scaled the 7-foot-tall block wall at the edge of her yard to get away.

“I just wanted to scare him,” Debby said. “If he had come into the house, it might have been different.”

After watching the man disappear over the wall, she went back inside and turned on the TV, waiting for police to arrive. She did not call police, but figured a concerned neighbor, hearing the gunshot, would summon authorities. A half hour later, when they did not come, she said she went back to bed to wait a bit longer before going back to sleep.

Debby said her father taught her how to handle a gun. Part of that was that you “never shoot anybody in the back,” she said, saying there was no honor in that.

“It happened so fast,” she said. “It just wasn’t that big of a deal. I’m glad nobody was hurt. I think somebody was looking out for me, other than my dog.”

Debby described the intruder as white, mid-20s, about 6 feet tall. She had never seen him before.

“He was wearing blue jeans, a light blue hoodie, white tennis shoes and the look of fear on his face. Honestly, I don’t think he’ll be coming back.”