JAY – A woman confronted and stopped a man who’s accused of picking a lock to enter her mother’s home Tuesday on Hidden Circle in North Jay. Later, she said that it wasn’t until after it was over that she started shaking.
Jay police Cpl. Jeffrey Fournier arrested Thomas Stires, 30, also of Hidden Circle, on a charge of burglary, Jay Police Chief Larry White Sr. said Tuesday.
Lori James, 42, said she surprised the man who had knocked on the door several times and then apparently decided to forcefully enter it at about noon.
“I don’t know what took over,” James said. “I grabbed the door and pulled it open as he was still holding on to it.”
When she asked him what he was doing, she said he replied he sometimes did this when he was bored.
“I told him, You stay right where you are, keep your hands in your pockets and don’t move,'” James said Tuesday night.
She called 911 and when the person on the other end asked if the man had any weapons, she said she started to realize what she had done.
“Oh my God, what am I doing,” James said she was thinking. “I have a burglar standing here. But I was very concerned for my mother.”
James said she brought the phone closer to the man as he stood there while she talked to police.
James said she then asked him if understood that everything he was saying was being heard by police and he said yes.
“What alarmed me the most was he was very calm and he didn’t flee,” she added.
Her protective instinct kicked in she said when he entered her mother’s home, she said, because it was clear to her that he knew her mother wasn’t home. Her mother’s car wasn’t in the yard, she said.
James said she didn’t know Stires, who lives in the same mobile home park as her mother. James is staying with her mother.
“I didn’t start shaking until it was over,” she said.
He never had the opportunity to take anything, White said.
Stires was taken to Franklin County jail and released on bail the same day on $5,000 unsecured bail, a corrections officer said.
He is scheduled to appear Jan. 25 in 12th District Court in Farmington.
Wilton Police Chief Wayne Gallant backed Fournier on the call.
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