Attempted break-in victim: ‘It was like survivor mode’

BATON ROUGE, LA (WAFB) - Home should be comfortable, home should feel safe, but for Falon Brown, home is now what she avoids.

“Every time I enter my apartment, I just relive the experience. I’m traumatized,” Brown said. “I have nightmares about it. I had one last night. I’ve gone through the possible scenarios a million times in my head.”

Last Saturday, when LSU fans were gearing up for the game, Brown was fighting off a possible burglar, but not just your common criminal. It started with a knock at the door. “It started getting louder and harder,” Brown recalls. “He started banging on it. I’m like, okay, this is weird.”

The LSU student says she went upstairs to get a better view. She says the stranger was tampering with a window. Brown’s next thought: stop him.

“I yelled through the window. I was like ‘Hey, I’m in here. The police are on their way. You better go away.'"

But here’s where things took a really different turn. “…And then he comes back, and he has on latex gloves and he has a toolbox," Brown said.

Brown says then she watched the man pick up a piece of chalk and mark her fence, but what happened next changed everything. “I heard the buzzing of what I thought was a drill, but it was actually an electric glass cutter,” she said. “He was cutting my window open.”

At this point, Brown was making her second call to 911, but this time, she was armed. “I grabbed my gun,” the student said. “I was upstairs on my balcony looking down at the door, ready to shoot. “I thought I was going to die. I was so scared."

The would-be burglar ran, but this same fear was also instilled in another student that lives up the road.

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“She said, ‘Lilly wake up. There was just a man in my room,’” student, Lillian Knight recalls.

Knight and her friend were asleep when they woke up to a stranger in their house. This was their second break-in in just a week’s time. “I think there’s a problem, obviously. People think it’s okay to enter someone’s house while they’re sleeping in a gated student community. There’s a problem,” Knight said.

Knight says the burglar took money, a cell phone, and driver’s license. She now has plans to move.

This culture of crime has ignited a spark in these victims. Brown says having her life in danger was scary, but it wasn’t enough to stop her from standing her ground.

“Honestly, it’s sad that we have to take these certain precautions because we’re women. If I was a man, this probably wouldn’t have happened to me,” Brown said. “I knew that it was going to be me or him if he entered my apartment and it wasn’t going to be me. I was determined to let it not be me. It was like survivor mode. Fight or flight kicked in and I decided to fight.”

Brown says she plans to organize a group to advocate for better safety measures for apartment complexes.

Both victims say they want to encourage everyone to be aware of their surroundings. “I really just think that people need to be aware of what’s going on around them because I wasn’t before and it happened,” Knight said.

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