At approx 0400 Dec 26th, I walked into my house via the front door. I live in a duplex, and I'm friendly with the guy who lives in the upstairs portion. I had taken a walk to go to the all-night diner a few blocks from my house and grabbed some take-out. My dog was left in his kennel, as he is just short of 9 months old and loves to chew everything, including furniture. As it is a duplex, we have a "shared" front door and then a "inside" front door, with separate keys for the inside doors. As I was walking up the porch steps, the dog was barking rather loud. I didnt think anything of it at the time, he gets really excited to see me when I get home and he might have heard me whistling on the way up the porch steps. After opening the "shared" front door, I opened the "inside" door. This is when everything went to shit, because immediately after opening the front door I realized two things: a.) my dog was not barking his "Happy to see you" bark, he was barking "When I get close enough, I'm going to fuck you up"; and b.) there was some dude I've never seen before sitting on my couch, which rather obviously was the cause of item "a.)".
(not quite) Gratuitous MS Paint diagram:
My first reaction was to ask the guy "Who the fuck are you?" He gave me some non-answer, exactly what it was I forget. I bellowed to my upstairs neighbor "Hey Justin, are you missing a buddy?" thinking he was visiting my neighbor and had wandered down from upstairs. Justin heard me through the floor and yelled back "What? No one's here but me". At which point we had a problem. I told him to get out. I told him to get the fuck out. I told him to GET THE FUCK OUT. After the third of my escalating commands, he charged me. I specifically remember him saying, and I quote: "I'm going to fucking kill you."
I had my 3.5" assisted opening pocketknife on my right hip. In my left pocket I had my Surefire with a Malkoff LED (~235 lumens, and the house was dark, I'm sure it would have disoriented/blinded him). To my left the latch to my German Shepherd's kennel, where he was fairly screaming for me to let him at the shitbird (while I heard him barking loudly from 12" to my left, my brain stupidly classed that as "non-relevant" and I hardly even recall hearing it). Did I think to reach for any of those while yelling at him to get out? No. This is one of many *facepalm*'s. I took the intruder's charge and threw him into the entertainment center. I then got position behind him and applied a chokehold while laying on top of him. He struggled for a while until I got the chokehold in good and tight, then went limp after a few seconds. During the struggle at one point I thought he might be about to get free, and I considered using my knife on him. However, I did not then and do not now know what diseases he might have, and since the chokehold is a relatively bloodless way to make him submit, I stuck with it. Winning the battle only to contract AIDS is not winning the war. I was aware enough to realize I was fizzing with adrenaline, and that I could have broken a major bone and not have known it, never mind acquiring a minor cut/scrape. During this portion of the fight I was yelling for my neighbor to call the cops, and heard him saying he was doing so.
Soon after he went limp, I let go of the chokehold and ran towards my bedroom. I was on the lookout for other threats, but I figured the guy didnt have any friends with him, because we were fucking around in the living room long enough that a paraplegic could have gotten into there from anywhere else in the house. I grabbed my AR, quickly cleared my house**, and ended up back out in the living room. I put one boot on his shoulder/neck, and the muzzle against his ear (he was laying on his stomach, with his head to the side). About this time he started to come around, and started to (fuzzily) fight against my boot... and grabbed onto the barrel. I started yelling at him "Stop resisting, I've got a gun". He was still not lucid, but his struggles were getting stronger. I poked his head in the temple (or thereabouts, that's where I aimed for anyways) with the muzzle and repeated my command. He continued struggling, again while getting stronger. Now, a brief aside about my AR. I have a BAD lever on it, and typically store it with a loaded 30 round mag full of 75gr TAP rounds, but with the bolt back and the dust cover closed. I like to dry fire my AR, and Hornady warns people that trying to re-use a previously chambered round will result in a much higher chance of a FTF due to the dimpling of the primer caused by the repeated impacts of the AR's free-floating firing pin. I don't want each dry-fire session to cost me a dollar (aka the price of turning a TAP round into a practice round). So as a compromise of speed/frugality I keep it in the above state. At this I took my finger off the index position, swept the BAD lever on the way to the trigger, and flicked the selector to "fire" while jamming the muzzle into his head and shouting that "I have a gun, stop resisting!" while my finger started to take up slack on the trigger. No effect, he continued to stuggle. Fuck. Legally I believe I would have been in the clear had I shot him at this point*. I had a large potential problem in the court of public opinion for a couple of reasons, one being I would have shot a man while he was on the ground and the other being I'm white and he was black. I have no desire to see the "Reverend" Al Sharpton picketing my house.[/politics] I have no particular desire to shoot a man, for that matter. Some people may think I balked, that I couldn't shoot this guy. In truth, I didnt want to deal with the mess his corpse would have caused, both legally and physically. I was tiptoeing the line between turning his head into a canoe or not when I decided that I could just choke him out again. I safed the rifle, tossed it onto the couch, and threw an elbow into the back of the guys head while I dropped on top of him.
From this point it got somewhat less exciting. I would choke the guy out every time he would struggle with me, then relax while he was napping. We did that at least three times (I wasn't counting, it could have been a lot more) before the cops showed up. It was at this point my housemate was relaying the retarded dispatcher's questions, like "Is anyone hurt?". Bitch, we're STILL FIGHTING. It's a fluid situation. Send the fucking EMS anyways. I swear though, she must have asked a half dozen times before I told him to just say "yes". The cops showed up. I was just choking the guy out once again. The cops asked from outside if the dog was secured (he was definitely "in drive" and vocal about it). I said yes. I also told them I was the homeowner, I was on top of the intruder, and he was newly unconscious. I also mentioned the AR, as a LEO with a heads up is a less jumpy LEO. The cops entered the house, and I told them I would release him when they told me to. They gave me the word, I got up, put my hands above my head and took a couple steps back. The cops cuffed him, rolled the shitbird over, and one of them distastefully poked him with his shoe like he would a piece of roadkill (I admit it, I chuckled). They then gave him a sternum rub. When he came to, Cop #1 asked him if he knew where he was. Cop #2 laughed pretty good at that and said did he look like he knows where he is
. Now, I'm not a doctor, but I'm fairly confident that repeated oxygen delivery issues is not going to help brain function. Speaking of which, during this entire encounter the intruder seemed to be on *something*, though whether it was booze or something stronger I don't know. One of the cops went into the kitchen and saw the glass from my rear window splattered all over the kitchen (aka, how the shitbird made entry).To wrap it up, the shitbird got arrested, I BS'ed with the officers outside for a few minutes, thanked them, and then my housemate and I put a small dent in a bottle of Knob Creek special reserve. I've got some aches from muscles strained while grappling with the dude, but no visible injuries except for a tinny tiny scratch on my forehead that I didnt notice until today when it was brought to my attention. He's being charged with F2 Burglary. I talked to my buddy on the Cleveland PD and he said he'd expect the guy to also get charged with Aggravated Assault. We'll see. Also, a few of my friends who saw me tonight called me "Wayne Brady"
I can see at least a half dozen fuck-ups in this clusterfuck, from "not recognizing my dog's agitated barking on my way into the house" to "not letting the dog butt-fuck this shitbird's soul" to "bringing a gun to a fist-fight and not using it"... but overall I've got to admit I'm happy with the results. I walked away with nothing but muscle aches, he destroyed some property but didnt take anything that can't be replaced, he's in jail and I don't have the media circus outside my house that shooting him in the head would have started, and I've got a new "Well, at least this year wasn't as bad as that one time..." baseline for a successful Christmas.
ETA: I posted this to get critiqued as far as what I did and did not do, with the aim to improve going forward. So... let's hear it.
*I believe that it would have been a legal shoot because he attacked me in my house, and he was struggling for the gun (albeit feebly). Could a prosecutor argue that my fetching my gun was time I could have spent retreating? Maybe. I could argue that since I did run to my weapon and then search the house for other bad guys before ending up back in my living room I was still actively engaged in the situation the whole time.
**Due to the floor plan, if you are doing a balls out hasty "clear" of the house it can be done in a handful of seconds. I knew there was not going to be a safe method to clear the house, so I decided speed and explosiveness were the closest things I was going to get to safety and ran through it as quick as possible. I did not take the time to check closets, etc. OTOH, getting focused on the guy in my living room to the exclusion of all else wasn't very safe either...
Doesn't mean it would go anywhere, but then again it might. 
