BY: SHAWN VINCENT

Melinda Herman was working from home and watching her 9-year-old twins on the Friday following New Year’s 2013 when she noticed a stranger come to the front door. He rang the doorbell twice. She didn’t answer. The unknown man then began incessantly ringing the bell over and over. She still didn’t answer. Then the man walked to his SUV, retrieved a crowbar, and began to march back towards the front door.

Herman quickly gathered her children and rushed upstairs. She grabbed a six-shot revolver her husband had taught her to fire just two weeks earlier. She went to her bedroom and locked the door. She retreated into the ensuite bathroom and locked that door, too. Then she and her children crawled into an adjacent attic space through a tiny door in the bathroom. There she waited.

At some point, she grabbed her cell phone and called her husband Donnie at work. He, in turn, dialed 9-1-1 to report the intrusion. Shortly thereafter, the stranger forced his way into the bedroom. “Shh, shh, relax,” Donnie told his wife. “Just remember everything that I showed you, everything that I taught you, all right?” 

Then the intruder broke through the locked bathroom door. Only one last door stood between her, her children, and the stranger with the crowbar. “Melinda,” her husband said, “If he opens up the door, you shoot him! You understand?” 

When the intruder opened up the small access door to the attic where Herman and her children hid, she followed her husband’s advice. She fired all six rounds. One bullet missed, but the other five struck 32-year-old Paul Slater in the face and torso. A career criminal, Slater bolted from the house and tried to escape in his SUV, but he crashed into a tree, where first responders later found him and managed to save his life. Herman and her children escaped to a neighbor’s house and waited for the police to arrive.

Slater was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Police declared Melinda Herman’s use of force justified that very day, praising her for her courageous home defense. 

 

Lessons for Armed Defenders:

Get Firearms and Self-Defense Training (Lesson 2)

This terrifying home invasion may have ended tragically if Herman hadn’t benefited from hands-on training with the revolver just two weeks previously. If she had never fired the weapon before, she may not have been comfortable using it when she faced the intruder. Armed defenders must take the time to become familiar with their firearms and practice regularly enough to maintain their competence and confidence.

 

De-escalate With Verbal Cues (Lesson 20)

When Slater, a career criminal, incessantly rang the doorbell, he was likely trying to determine that nobody was home before he burglarized the house. If Herman was able to confidently and authoritatively address Slater verbally through the closed, locked door, and ask him to leave, then he intruder would likely have gone off to find an unoccupied home. If he didn’t, she still would have been prepared to meet his threat with force.

 

Don’t Shoot Through Doors (Lesson 28)

The intruder broke through three locked doors to get to Melinda Herman and her children. When he tried to break through the final door to access the crawl space, Melinda might have been tempted to fire through the door to stop the impending threat. She was wise to wait until Slater actually breached the door because, at that moment, she had a clear view of an unambiguously imminent and serious threat, allowing her to act decisively, effectively, and justifiably.  

 

Find Your Hard Corner (Lesson 29)

Many home defenders feel tempted to meet an apparent intruder at the front door, but firearms instructor Steve Moses recommends withdrawing deeper into the house and finding a defensible spot in a hard corner—that’s the corner of the room along the same wall as the door, where you can see an intruder enter before they see you. By retreating deep into her home, Herman had plenty of warning that the intruder was coming and that he had violent intentions. Steve notes, however, that she put herself in a precarious position by hiding in the crawl space with no egress. She may have been better off taking a hard corner behind her locked bedroom door.