Saucier, Mississippi

From Biloxi’s WLOX.com of October 17, 2006

Saucier Couple Says Of Gunman: "It Was Him Or Us"

A gun battle in Saucier ended with an armed robbery suspect dead and an elderly couple lucky to be alive.

Beth Greer, 73, and her husband Tommy Greer, 60, say they returned home from work shortly before 11pm Monday night. Within minutes, they were staring down the barrel of a gun.

The blood stains have dried but the memories are still fresh in Beth Greer's mind. She says one moment she was unloading her car, the next she was asking a gunman to spare her life.

"Out of nowhere to my right there was this voice that said 'Hey." So I turned around and looked and it was this masked man. He had a mask on and a jacket that all seemed like it blended together and he had a gun in his hand pointed at me," Beth Greer said.

Greer screamed for her husband who was inside. That's when she says the gunman walked past her and into the house to confront Tommy Greer.

"He had the gun pointed at me," said Tommy Greer. "I figured he was going to shoot me anyway so why not try to whip him, take him down. So me and him went 20 feet over there. He shot and hit me up through the head and it [the bullet] went up the wall into the ceiling. "

Still outside, Beth Greer had grabbed a gun from her car.

"I heard a shot go off and, of course, I just knew he had killed Tommy. In an instant, he stepped back into the garage. One step in the garage, still with his gun pointed at me, and I just opened fire on him. I just shot, shot, shot, shot," Beth Greer remembered.

At the Harrison County Sheriff's Department on Tuesday, the Greers finally got to see the face behind the mask. To their surprise it was Bobby Hardy, a regular customer at their store in Gulfport. The Sheriff says Hardy, whose criminal history included aggravated assault and armed robbery, probably followed the couple home.

Sheriff George Payne said, "Historically, we don't release the names of victims like this, and they're victims involved in shootings. But they wanted to do that to tell their story so the rest of the public knows that this is America and we're not going to be intimidated by these thugs that think they can come to our homes and rob us or shoot us, and we're not just going be intimidated and roll over for them. Quite frankly, there was a gun battle there and she won the gun battle and this outlaw lost his life."