The window broke while she was still on the phone.
It was just after 9 p.m. on the night of September 7, on Calgary Drive in west Mobile, Alabama. A woman had called 911 about a stranger at her house. The dispatcher asked if she knew him.
“No! I don’t know the person,” she said. “My husband is armed and he is trying to get the person to leave. He is knocking at our window.”
Then: “He broke my window!”
Then a gunshot. Then five words: “No! My husband had to shoot.”
The recordings were released this week by FOX 10 in Mobile, and they lay out the night with a clarity most of these stories never get.
Six minutes, two calls
The first 911 call that night didn’t come from the house. It came from a business owner nearby, reporting a man on his property: “He was just climbing at the top of our barbed wire getting in when I saw him.” The business’s surveillance cameras, around 9:13 p.m., showed the same man crawl up a set of stairs, try to climb through a window, and fall. He never got inside the business.
Minutes later, he was at the family’s window instead.
By 9:19 p.m., the homeowner’s wife was on the line with 911: “There’s somebody trying to break into my house.” Her husband was at the window, armed, trying to warn the stranger off — she told the dispatcher so while it was happening. Then the glass gave way. Police say the man, later identified as 37-year-old David Lee Jr., broke through the window and got inside, and the homeowner shot and killed him.
The wife was still on the phone: “Help us! Please help us!”
Where the case stands
The homeowner has not been named, and no charges have been reported as of this writing. According to the station’s reporting, the Mobile County District Attorney’s office will present the case to a grand jury. That same reporting has pointed to Alabama’s stand-your-ground law, under which a homeowner has no duty to retreat from someone breaking into his own home.
What the tape shows
Listen past the fear in those calls and you hear a family doing nearly everything right.
She called early — before the glass broke, not after — and she stayed on the line. Every warning and every second of that encounter went onto the record in real time. The people now reviewing this case don’t have to reconstruct what happened in that house. They can listen to it.
And her husband warned the man first. He was armed and at the window, trying to get a stranger to leave, while his wife told the dispatcher exactly that. The shot didn’t come until the window did. That isn’t eagerness. That’s a man holding the last line he had, for as long as he could hold it.
Nobody in that house wanted what happened next. A man died on Calgary Drive, and there is nothing in that to celebrate.
But the right to defend your home comes down to nights like this one — and to the five words a wife said with the phone still in her hand: “My husband had to shoot.”
