A Florida woman who awoke Monday night to an intruder in her bedroom was saved by her quick thinking after she grabbed her son's toy gun and scared the burglar off.
Jane Rainboth of Deerfield Beach, Fla., woke up because her dog was barking but soon realized that a strange masked man, later identified by police as 27-year-old Roland Stuart Jr., was in her room.
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Rainboth, who keeps her 17-year-old son's fake pistol nearby for protection, quickly grabbed the toy gun and screamed, "I got a gun! I got a gun!"
The Airsoft replica shoots small rubber pellets barely harmful enough to hurt a squirrel, but Stuart didn’t know that.
"I guess if somebody tells you they've got a gun, you
don't want to stick around to find out if it's real or not," Rainboth told the Sun-Sentinel. "You could see the whites of his eyes in the dark. That's kind of what haunts me."
Stuart tried to escape but a police dog soon found him hiding in the woods nearby. He was arrested, charged with burglary of an occupied dwelling, and held on a $750,000 bond.
According to police, Stuart cut the back patio screen and entered the house after prying open a sliding glass door.
"I hope he will learn something from this and maybe think twice before he ever does it again," Rainboth said.
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