http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/local/14061930.htm

Residents foil would-be burglars in two instances

By CHRISTINE VENDEL

The Kansas City Star

Posted on Fri, Mar. 10, 2006

According to police, residents thwarted two attempted break-ins in two unrelated crimes.

In one, the resident shot an intruder three times. In the other, a 13-year-old boy home alone outsmarted a group of youths trying to get into his house.

Police gave this account:

The boy said he was home from school because he was sick. About 11 a.m., he heard banging on the front door of his house in the 1200 block of College Avenue. He looked outside and saw five men who appeared to be 18 to 19 years old and who made eye contact with him. They then moved to a kitchen window that had been left ajar the previous night. The men pried the screen off the window, but the 13-year-old pushed the window shut and locked it. The men left.

The boy called his mother, then his father, then his mother again. Then he called police.

The other foiled burglary Thursday occurred a few hours later.

A Kansas City man told police he became suspicious when he heard his doorbell ring just after 1 p.m. but didn’t see anyone standing outside his front door.

The man got a .45-caliber pistol and walked to the door just in time to see a man using his shoulder to crash through the front door, police said.

The resident fired at the intruder, who began to flee the home in the 6800 block of Sni-A-Bar Road.

The resident fired several more times, knocking the intruder down in the yard. But the intruder got back up and slipped into a white Ford van that was parked in the driveway of a vacant house next door.

The resident wrote down the first three digits of the license plate before the intruder sped off.

Five or ten minutes later, someone called police from the 4400 block of Kensington Avenue to report a shooting. When officers showed up, they noticed a white Ford van parked across the street with shattered windows and a flat tire. The first three digits of the license plate matched those given by the burglary victim.

The shooting victim, (huh? I think she means wounded potential perpetrator?)  a 48-year-old man, had suffered gunshot wounds to his arm, leg and abdomen. He was expected to survive.

An ambulance took him to a hospital, where police officers were guarding his room Thursday night. Detectives were interviewing the resident of the home Thursday night and investigating whether the wounded man at the hospital was responsible for the break-in.