While in his family’s garage late at night, a man heard what he believed to be glass shattering. The noise was coming from his neighbor’s home, and he quickly realized they were likely being robbed. That’s when he grabbed his gun. What happened next was captured on surveillance video.
Andrew Carrera of Mobile, Alabama was minding his own business in his family’s garage late one Friday night when things took a scary turn for him and his family. According to Carrera, he heard glass shattering at the home across the street and realized the home was likely being robbed. Rather than ignore what was happening, Carrera flew into action, but not before packing his pistol.
“I hollered at my step-dad — ‘I think somebody’s breaking in [to the neighbor’s house] — call 9-1-1’ — and that’s when I took off,” Carrera recalled. “I jumped the fence and I ran up to where the door was — but the whole door was kicked in, all the glass was kicked in. At that point, I grabbed my firearm and I screamed, ‘Get the h*** out of the house!’ — I screamed it twice — and it got really loud.”
Carrera was right. A pair of burglars were breaking into his neighbor’s home, and the two male subjects had started firing at him. As he found himself in the middle of a shootout with the armed intruders, Carrera prayed to God that his life would be spared. “When it all went down — when the gunfire and all that started, I just said, ‘God, watch over us.’ That was the first thing I said when I came through the front door,” Carrera said, as he shared his harrowing account with FOX10 News.
“I ran around the left side of my neighbor’s house, and when I got to the corner of the house — they were coming out the front door at the same time and they were shooting backward. When he shot his first one, it [whizzed] right past my damn ear,” Carrera told the news station, making a whizzing sound. In addition to detailing the traumatic chain of events, Carrera also shared the surveillance video captured at his family’s home.
In the surveillance video footage captured from the vantage point of Carrera’s home, his stepdad is seen coming out of the house in a white shirt. In the upper right corner of the video, Carrera is huddled behind a vehicle in the driveway for protection. As the suspects fled on foot, shots were fired in his direction, but thankfully, Andrew Carrera and his family made it out of the ordeal unscathed. The same couldn’t be said for the burglars.
During the encounter, which Carrera said was “45 seconds tops — the whole thing,” even though “It felt like 4 to 5 hours,” Carrera claims he struck one of the suspects. “About 10 minutes later, a call came through the radio that someone had just been rushed to the hospital with multiple gunshot wounds. He was matching the exact description that I gave them,” Carrera explained, according to The Blaze.
After receiving a 9-1-1 call from Andrew Carrera, the Mobile Police Department responded to the 1000 block of McGough Court in reference to the burglary in progress. Shortly after, officers also responded to University Hospital in reference to a 20-year-old male who arrived with a non-life-threatening gunshot wound, investigators said, although it was not immediately confirmed if the incidents were related. Of course, Carrera was quite certain the two were connected.
Either way, Andrew Carrera is happy that he and his family are alive, and he credits the fact that he was ready and able to defend his family. Cautioning others and seemingly offering some advice, he said, “It’s a crazy experience that I hope no one has to deal with — but if you do have to, I hope you’re prepared to deal with it.”
