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“She came down and helped me, helped a stranger with a gun pointing at someone else, so she’s pretty brave,” said Steven Davenport, recalling the incident that landed him with the memorable photo above.
This happened in the middle of the day on Friday when Mr. Davenport was working at his home in Yukon, Oklahoma. He heard his door chime but thought nothing of it. He pulled his garage door closed and went back to work.
Then, he heard it again. This time, when he pulled on the door handle, the door pulled back.
Mr. Davenport armed himself, opened the door to his garage, and looked inside. Immediately, he saw the intruder, identified as Jared Bennett, looking back at him.
“I anticipated either not seeing him, or seeing the back of him running away, but for him to be standing there staring at me… that really got my attention,” Mr. Davenport said to reporters. “At that point, I took my 45 and racked a round and told him he was going to die if he didn’t get on the ground.”
Mr. Davenport directed the intruder to crawl to the front yard and started calling for help. Either he didn’t feel comfortable reaching for his cell phone, or (more likely) he didn’t happen to be surgically attached to it.
“He started pleading, ‘I just wanted some water, please sir, let me go, I’ll never come back,’” said Mr. Davenport. But he didn’t feel like playing catch-and-release. “I just got mad. You don’t get to come in my house.”
Fortunately, it wasn’t long before a jogger came across the situation and was able to help, using her telephone to call 9-1-1 and also (since it’s 2018) snap a glamour shot…err,
gather photographic evidence of Mr. Davenport and the perp.
“Yes, we have an emergency,” she reported calmly to the dispatcher. “There was a guy breaking into a house in our addition and he’s being held at gunpoint on the ground.”
Thanks to the healthy gun culture in Oklahoma, the jogger was informed enough to know what to do in this situation. The break-in was stopped without excess panic and without physical harm to anyone involved. The invader was taken into custody upon officers’ arrival. All things considered, this was an ideal defensive gun use.
Here’s the news video featuring the full interview with Mr. Davenport as well as the 9-1-1 recording. It’s worth a watch.
