Home Defense in North Carolina

"If you don't come out we're going to blow your brains out," the couple told a figure hiding underneath a bedspread. Richard Osborne was holding a single shot 12 gauge on the hiding intruder. Richard's hearing was not as sharp as it once was, but his wife Phyllis had the hearing of a watchdog. She knew the sounds she had heard just a few minutes earlier were not right.

She also knew the bedspread would not be on the floor in the bedroom. Her husband Richard had armed himself with the old shotgun her father had used to slaughter hogs. "Don't shoot, Don't shoot!" the intruder pleaded as he emerged from hiding. The intruder tried to claim that the home owner's daughter had asked him to come. Richard Osborne knew better, his daughter was married to a policeman in Decatur Georgia. Next, the intruder tried to claim he was at the wrong house and just wanted to leave. Mr. Osborne told him he wasn't going anywhere, that he would wait for police. He ordered his prisoner to sit down.

Once seated, Joshuah Rutledge decided he would smoke a cigarette while he waited. Mr. Osborne told him no, that he would not smoke in his home. Rutledge decided to light up anyway. "So I took this gun and hit him upside the head with it," stated Mr. Osborne, "The cigarette went that way, his head went that way."

Police arrived to find a compliant Rutledge held at gunpoint by the home owner. Richard Osborne was not sure whether the old shotgun would fire. Rutledge had broken into another home in the same neighborhood a short while earlier. He was locked in the Gaston County Jail under $100,000 bond. He faces two charges of first degree burglary.

Story in the Gaston Gazette