When a child found a home intruder hiding in her playroom, her mother decided to take action, wanting to make him pay.
Cory Conquest was at her Greenbrier, Tennessee, home on a Friday when her family saw a man enter the garage of their Lynwood Drive residence and disappear. After searching her house and not finding him, Cory assumed he had walked back out. Sadly, an hour later, she’d realize she was mistaken when her frightened 8-year-old daughter came running to her from her playroom, screaming and crying.
“She came running back downstairs screaming and crying that there was a man up there,” Cory Conquest recalled. “Because of what had happened earlier in the day, I assumed it was the same man.”
At that point, correctly believing that this man had been hiding in her house for an hour, Cory faced a difficult decision as adrenaline pumped through her body. With an intruder in her home, along with three small children whom she wanted to protect, would her fight or flight instinct win? Wanting to see the man pay, Cory decided to take action.
“I immediately grabbed a kitchen knife for my own protection,” Cory Conquest said. “I stepped to the bottom of the playroom stairs as he came stumbling down the stairs.”
After arming herself with a kitchen knife, the protective mother held the intruder at knifepoint until the police arrived. Thankfully, that only took two minutes since several 911 callers had already reported a “suspicious man” in the area near the Conquest family’s home, WSMV reported. With police still in the area searching for the suspect, they arrived quickly.
“He just should have never come in my home,” Cory Conquest said. “And he was going to wait for the police to come. Because then my second thought was that I wanted him to pay for what he had done to my family.”
Officers with the Greenbrier Police Department arrested the man, identified as 39-year-old Charles Mann of White House, SBN reported. According to authorities, Mann had hidden from officers near Old Greenbrier Pike during two separate instances earlier that day before he made the mistake of entering the Conquest family home.
Following his arrest, Mann was reportedly being held at the Robertson County Detention Facility in Springfield on a $40,000 bond, facing charges of aggravated burglary and carjacking. Sadly, this wasn’t his first run-in with the law. Instead, Mann had a lengthy criminal history, including previously being charged with domestic assault, theft, and possession of drug paraphernalia, The Blaze reported.
While Cory Conquest was able to protect her daughter from physical harm, the encounter with a home intruder has left an invisible wound on the innocent child, who Cory said was still unable to step foot into her playroom days after the terrifying ordeal.
“We’re not ok now, three days later. But we’re just taking it day by day,” Cory Conquest admitted. “[My daughter] can follow me around the house if she wants to, and we’ll just all sleep in the same room as long as we need to. But no, we don’t feel safe in our home right now.”
A person’s home is typically the one place where they are supposed to feel safe. When that’s breached by a criminal who not only trespassed but hid for over an hour unbeknownst to the family inside, that’s frightening, to say the least. Understandably, it will take time to recover from such a traumatic event, but we are glad that they will have that opportunity, thanks in part to Cory’s bravery, which resulted in the criminal being captured. However, we would be remiss if we didn’t point out that the Conquest family got incredibly lucky.
While we applaud this mother’s fortitude and celebrate her successfully detaining a criminal, we shudder to think what could have happened if he had been armed with a gun or simply overtook Cory and gained control of her knife. For this reason, I’d much rather see a mother defending her family and home with a firearm. One can only hope that the Conquests and others who hear their terrifying story will take added measures to protect their home, including entryway cameras that would have alerted the family to the fact that the intruder never left. Frankly, Cory Conquest got lucky, but others might not have the same good fortune.
