Kansas City, Missouri

From the Kansas City Star of March 10, 2006

Residents foil would-be burglars in two instances

It was a bad day for would-be home burglars Thursday in Kansas City.

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 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, 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.