She’d always “felt safe in her neighborhood,” said[1] an unnamed young woman in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. That is, until around midnight of October 25, 2008, when she heard a crash in her basement.
A 47-year-old registered sex offender named Ronnie W. Preyer had broken into her home. She “made a beeline to the back door, but Preyer was waiting for her,” writes Bridget DiCosmo of the Southeast Missourian. She fought back, but was punched, “twice, she thinks.” Before leaving, her rapist told her, “Don’t tell anybody, I know where you live.”
“I wasn’t going to tell, but the more I thought about it, the worse I felt,” she recalls.
The landlord fixed her window and installed security devices to the doors, and, “in a gesture that may have saved her life, purchased a shotgun for her” before teaching her how to load it.
At 2 AM on October 31st, the lights went out. “She knew she’d paid the electric bill,” according to DiCosmo. And she knew “something wasn’t right.”
DiCosmo continues, “She got her gun. Growing nervous, she opened the blinds, sat down in a chair, and waited.” When Preyer came crashing through the door, she fired, striking her assailant in the chest and killing him.
Police had been making rounds to her home after the first encounter with her rapist. But they weren’t there in that fateful moment when she had to defend herself with a gun that had been purchased for her by her landlord. The gun was the difference between her being raped again and/or killed and surviving unmolested. The gun preserved her life and liberty in spite of another person who looked to
