87-year-old Marjorie Perkins of Brunswick, Maine, got quite the shock when she woke up in the middle of the night to find a pantless teen hovering over her.
"I'm going to cut you," the teen said.
She was alone in the home.
She says,
"I thought to myself, ‘If he's going to cut, I'm going to kick.' So I jumped into my shoes."
With her shoes secured, she grabbed a chair and used it as a shield.
"That helped. I was hollering for help out the window. … He kept punching me and pushing me."
The teen punched and kicked at her, and he managed to punch her in the forehead and leave a bruise, but she used the chair to keep him at bay.
"Thank God I had the chair between us. It would've been worse."
Eventually, like most teens, he got bored and went to the kitchen to look for snacks.
Marjorie saw his pants and his knife sitting on her air conditioning unit. The teen had removed the side panel of the unit and squeezed into the room to attack her.
Undaunted, she followed him into the kitchen.
"I kept saying, ‘You need to get out. You need help,'" she said.
"He said he was awfully hungry and hadn't had anything to eat for quite a while."
"And I said, ‘Well, here's a box of peanut butter and honey crackers. You can have that whole box.' I gave him two containers of Ensure and I gave him two tangerines."
While the teen was eating his snackies, Marjorie dialed 911 on her rotary phone.
Yes, ROTARY phone.
"I dialed as fast as I could," she said.
The teen left before the police arrived, but a police dog tracked him down a few blocks away.
Marjorie said the boy was 17-years old and had a water bottle full of alcohol, and she recognized him. When he was younger, he used to mow her yard.
"He did a darn good job," she said. "I hope he gets help."
She credits her ability to fend the teen off due to remaining active. A former figure-skating teacher, she now teaches line dancing, which she has done for the last 25 years.
I can tell you this:
That boy will never forget the night he danced with The Indomitable Marjorie Perkins and lost.
P.S. What the heck is it lately with teens breaking into old ladies' homes and attacking them?
