WHEN an intruder broke into the home of retired 87-year-old Marjorie Perkins, he might have thought an older woman would not put up much of a fight.
“That was the worst part – to wake up in the dark and have this man standing over you,” the former primary school teacher of 35 years told the BBC.
“I’m going to cut you,” the young burglar said to her during the break-in at Brunswick, Maine.
Though she was terrified, Ms Perkins leapt into action and fought back.
The 17-year-old suspect has been charged with burglary, criminal threatening, assault and consuming liquor as a minor and is being held at a juvenile detention centre.
“I thought if I’m going to be cut,” Ms Perkins told the BBC, “I’m going to kick. So I jumped into my shoes as fast as I could.”
She used a lawn chair that was near her bed to defend herself as he came towards her.
He punched her cheek and forehead and kept knocking her against the wall.
Though it’s a quiet neighbourhood, she said, Ms Perkins’ house is situated on an intersection where people are often coming and going, so she “hollered out the window for help”.
Her town has about 21,000 residents.
They “had the chair fight for quite a while” before “he got tired and headed for the kitchen”, she said.
“I kept telling him to get out,” Ms Perkins recalled.
Suddenly he became “limp looking” and said he was “awfully hungry”.
When she told him he needed help, he said: “I’ve had help before but it hasn’t done much good.”
So Ms Perkins gave him a box of crackers with peanut butter and honey, two protein shakes and two tangerines.
“He didn’t touch any of those – he ate one cracker,” she said.
While he was eating, she called the emergency line 911 on her old rotary phone.
He fled the scene, out the front door.
By the time police arrived at Ms Perkins’ home they told her they already had the unidentified teenager in custody.
A police sniffer dog had tracked him to a nearby street where his grandmother lives.
All of the doors and windows of her mobile home were locked, but they discovered he had managed to break in near a window unit air conditioner.
During the altercation, he told her he had mowed her lawn “a long time ago”.
She remembers a “little boy coming here” maybe eight years ago, she said.
In another odd twist of fate, Ms Perkins was eating at a diner following the incident when a waitress sat down at her booth and said: “I know who the boy was, who did this to you – he’s my nephew.”
According to the woman, he has committed previous offences.
Since the break-in happened, she has received a lot of support from her neighbours, those in her line-dancing group and even reunited with half-sisters she has not spoken to in half a century.
Her story has been widely picked up by other international outlets.
Ms Perkins is surprised that people have taken such an interest in her story when there is so much else going on in the world.
But she said: “I think it does bring some hope or positivity.
“A lot of people have been quite amazed that I was brave enough to pick up a chair and fend him off.”