Limestone County: Woman to intruder, ‘If you take one more step I'll kill you’

Laura Williams says she grabbed her pistol and held an intruder at bay while her teenage daughter called 911 after the man kicked in the front door of her home on U.S. Highway 84 just outside of Mexia and charged her with a shovel.

“I aimed it at him and said if you take one more step I'll kill you,” she said Friday.

The man ran, but Limestone County deputies later arrested him.

Allen Tompkins, 47, was charged with burglary of a habitation, but additional charges are possible.

He’s held in the Limestone County Jail in lieu of $20,000 bond.

The incident happened Tuesday and Williams’ daughter, Hannah, 17, hasn’t been quite the same since.

"I felt really scared and my adrenaline was pumping so I don't really remember a lot of it, but I'm not sleeping well at all."

Laura Williams was awakened Tuesday morning by a ringing doorbell.

"I went to the door and just kind of opened it and there was an older man standing at my front door with a shovel and he asked for a lady's name and I said ‘there's no one here by that name I'm sorry, you're at the wrong house, she doesn't live here,’” Williams said.

The man left, but Williams says she felt uncomfortable.

She looked out through the blinds of her bedroom window to see if he had left.

"I looked out and he was standing at the opening of the woods with a shovel still in his hand and he kept looking back and looking, I said ‘no this is not going to go down like this.’"

Williams ran to the other side of her house where Hannah was asleep.

“I woke her up and I said ‘go to my bedroom, get the dogs and let's go’ because that's where we keep our guns in our house."

"No sooner did we get to the bedroom and shut the door, he was kicking in the front door and hitting it with the shovel,” Williams said.

Williams got her pistol out of the drawer of a bedside table and confronted the man in the living room while her daughter called 911.

“I had time to grab the revolver and come out the door. So when he came in the shovel was up on his shoulder, he was headed straight towards us,” she said.

"I aimed it at him and said ‘if you take one more step I'll kill you.’"

The man stopped, mumbled some words and turned to leave.

As he walked out the door he turned to back to Williams.

“He said 'Well all y'all need to know is y'all need to leave me the F alone,' and I said ‘I don't even know you, get out of my house, ‘" Williams said.

After the man left, she says she rushed back to the bedroom to look through the blinds again.

"I went back into my bedroom, I locked the door and I watched him go into the woods with a shovel still in his hands while we were still on the phone with 911."

Deputies arrived 14 minutes later and flooded the area, she said.

They found Tompkins in a nearby trailer park.

Williams, who once worked as a police officer in Bastrop, admits the confrontation left her rattled.

"My husband says I'm having nightmares calling Hannah's name trying to make sure she's safe. As much as I hate to say I killed somebody, I wished I would have so that I could sleep at night knowing that he's not going to come back,” she said.