In a courageous act of self-defense, a determined mother used a stick to fend off a threatening intruder who had broken into her home, just days after he was released following an alleged confession of indecent exposure at a local park.
Amanda Materi Brown was enjoying a late-night movie after her children were asleep last Thursday in her Portland, Oregon home when she suddenly heard alarming shouts coming from inside, she recounted to KPTV.
“He was yelling extremely loudly,” said the shaken mother, whose husband was away on business.
“The only words I could make out were, ‘I’ll kill you — I’ll kill everyone,'” she added.
The intruder, identified as Timothy Reed, brandished a metal trash can lid as if it were a shield, holding something else threateningly in his other hand, creating an intimidating scene, she described.
In response to the imminent danger, the vigilant mother decided to “fight fire with fire,” grabbing a sturdy stick she always kept by her bedside for protection.
“I yelled back and I just went for him,” she recalled — with doorbell footage capturing her screaming at him to “get the f–k outta here.”
“I just started swinging the stick at him and he started backing up from the house,” she said.
Police bodycam footage shows officers then closing in on the suspect, who was still holding the trash can lid — and who hit an arresting officer with a rock the size of a “softball,” according to the Portland Police Bureau, which said he’s now been cleared to return to duty.
The footage caught him yelling at the officers as they closed in, “I’ll kill you!”
Reed was arrested — and it emerged he’d been released just days earlier, despite being charged with exposing himself to kids in a park, and threatening to kill a cop who responded, according to the report.
He admitted knowing there were children around when he was naked — “but didn’t see a problem with it,” according to an arrest report, which said he “made rambling statements about ‘being told to do it by God.”
Reed was charged with burglary, escape, assault, assaulting a police officer and criminal mischief, cops said. He is being held at the Multnomah County Detention Center.
Brown says her youngest slept through ordeal, but her “oldest doesn’t feel safe in his house now.”
“I have that image burned into my retinas of somebody standing in my house,” she said.
“You know, bad things happen in life and we’re not going to let it make us afraid.”
