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Nerd Kills Intruder with Samurai Sword


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?From the Baltimore Sun:

Hours earlier, someone had broken into John Pontolillo’s house and
taken two laptops and a video-game console. Now it was past midnight,
and he heard noises coming from the garage out back.

The Johns Hopkins University undergraduate didn’t run. He didn’t call the police. He grabbed his samurai sword.

With the 3- to 5-foot-long, razor-sharp weapon in hand,
police say, Pontolillo crept toward the noise. He noticed a side door
in the garage had been pried open. When a man inside lunged at him,
police say, the confrontation was fatal.

Pontolillo … struck the intruder no more
than twice, police say, nearly severing his left hand and inflicting
what police termed a “spear laceration.”

The intruder, Donald D. Rice of Baltimore, a 49-year-old repeat
offender who had been released from jail only Saturday, died at the
bloody scene.

Fuck. I don’t know if this is a lesson in owning a weapon or not owning a weapon. I mean, I’m sure a fair amount of TR readers have nerdy weapons of some kind, although you’d probably be less likely to bust out a Lord of the Rings Glamdring replica on an intruder than a genuine katana. And if I heard someone in my house in the middle of the night, I’d sure as hell grab something — probably my crowbar (not a Half-Life replica; it’s just a crowbar). I’m not faulting the dude for protecting himself when the jackass lunged at him, either — but now this dude has killed a guy, even though that guy was a serial criminal and obviously a jackass. Somehow, I doubt the fact that he’s the first person to kill a guy with a samurai sword in quite some time is going to make up for this craziness. Thanks to everyone who sent in the tip.