And not a shot was fired. (Exercising the Right).

Celeen Hall of Highland Park, Pennsylvania, is a registered nurse. On January 11th, she was in her living room watching an NFL playoff game with her father and four-year-old daughter, when the front living-room window suddenly shattered. Assuming that it had been shot out, and that there might be more gunfire, the three dropped to the floor. When there was no shooting, they got up, only to find an intruder standing in the room. He had broken the window to gain entry.

Hall's father told her, "Celeen, get the gun," referring to the handgun he had given her several years earlier after the murder of an elderly woman who lived across the street. The gun, however, was sequestered in an upstairs closet.

Hall ducked into a hallway with her daughter and peeked around the corner. The intruder, having heard her father's instruction and believing that she was armed, pleaded, "Please don't shoot me."

As recounted in the January 15th Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Hall stared at him and thought, "'I'm not going to make this easy for you.' She decided that if the man thought she already had the gun, she needed to use that to her advantage."

"The way the house was made, if I'd let him get any closer, I'd be trapped," Hall told the Post-Gazette. "So I grabbed my daughter under my arm, like a football or a sack of potatoes, and then came around the corner and charged. I ran over him, through him, I don't know what."

Scurrying up the stairs, she reached into the closet for the gun and also grabbed a cordless telephone. After calling 911, she went back downstairs.

When the intruder -- later identified as Jamal Tompkins -- saw that she was indeed armed, he ran to the broken window, dived through headfirst, and fled. Police responding to the 911 call spotted him running through a neighboring yard and arrested him. His hands and face were covered with cuts inflicted by the broken glass. He was carrying a seven-inch knife and a four-inch metal crack pipe.

Tompkins' criminal record, dating back to 1992, also includes robbery, simple assault, reckless endangerment, and sundry drug offenses.

Hall modestly gives credit for Tompkins' apprehension to police officers Kelly Buettner and Bryan Perun, who responded to the 911 call. "They deserve all the glory' she told the Post-Gazette. "He jumped out of my window, and he could have jumped into somebody else's window right after if they weren't quick to respond. Those are the heroes."