Stabbing Suspect Tripped Up by Own Foot : Crime: Man believed to have attacked 72-year-old Anaheim woman almost escaped by hiding in closet.

The police dogs missed it. The detectives who combed the house missed it. Then, on his way out, an officer spotted it: a foot sticking out of a closet.

The foot belonged to an intruder who police suspect stabbed a 72-year-old woman about 12 times in the throat and torso with a steak knife and then, apparently believing that she was dead, began ransacking other rooms in the house.

But Fern Estes, mother of two, grandmother of six and great-grandmother of two more, in fact had gone to a neighbor’s house for help. And on Monday she was reported to be in fair condition at UCI Medical Center in Orange, where a ventilator was removed from her throat and she was finally able to recount to her family what happened.

Estes was sitting in the living room of her house, in the 800 block of North Pine Street, about 8:10 p.m. Saturday watching her favorite religious show, her daughters said.

She did not hear the man cut the screen to her enclosed back-yard patio, enter and try to unlock the deadbolt on her kitchen door, her daughters said. Neither did she hear when he went to the side of the house and apparently threw a 4-by-4 through a bedroom window and came in.

The man just appeared in her living room and seemed surprised to see her, Estes told her family.

“Money. I want your money,” he said. When Estes said she had no money, he cut her lip, lengthwise, with a steak knife.

They struggled, and she managed to break free several times, she said, but each time her attacker again caught her.

Serbando Gomez, 32, a neighbor working in his back yard at the time, said he heard glass break and then screaming. He told his wife to call the police while he ran over. “The lady was screaming real bad,” he said. He saw Estes and another person move past the living-room window, and then he rang the doorbell three times. The screaming stopped, and Gomez ran across the street to ask neighbors again to call the police.

Estes said that she heard Gomez ringing the doorbell but that the attacker had gagged her with a rag and stabbed her several times. Leaving her in the living room, he then went to the bedrooms.

Estes managed to run out of her kitchen, across the patio, along a brick path and through a wooden fence to the house next door. No one was home, so she went to the next house.

“She was just staggering,” said a neighbor from across the street who said she watched Estes after calling the police. Estes collapsed at the front door of the second house and scratched on it to get her neighbors’ attention. They heard her scratching and dragged her in.

Estes gave them the phone number of her daughter, Nancy Gerber, 51, of Westminster. Gerber called other family members, who drove over immediately, she said.

Gerber said the first police officer on the scene shined a flashlight into a window of Estes’ house and thought he saw someone move away. Police and a SWAT team surrounded the house and, using a bullhorn, ordered the man out.

When no one responded, officers searched the house with two dogs. They later told Estes’ granddaughter, Janeen Webb, 31, who had arrived from Tustin, that the man apparently got away. Webb said she then went to the hospital, where Estes had been taken.

Most of the police left, except for two plainclothes detectives and a uniformed officer investigating the crime scene. Hours later, when family members stopped by to lock up the house, the investigators told them to go have a cup of coffee while they finished up. The investigators were then about to leave when one of them spotted the foot.

The man, who gave his name as Remundo Garcia, 31, of Anaheim, was found in a closet packed with clothes and boxes.

Webb said she was at the hospital about 11 p.m. when the police came to tell her that they had captured a suspect. Webb said she couldn’t believe where they had found him.

“They said they missed him,” she said. “The guy was hiding in the closet the whole time. . . . They must have sent in the drug-smelling dog.”

Estes’ other daughter, Laura Dehlinger, 43, Yorba Linda, also was incredulous.

“This house is not huge,” she said, as she cleaned up the mess created by the intruder.

Estes told her family that she thought she was going to die.

“ ‘He was stabbing so hard. It hurt so bad. I thought I was a goner,’ ” Dehlinger said her mother said. Though she could not breathe and believed that she was about to die, Estes told her daughters, she was not afraid. She said she prayed, “Lord, just let it happen fast.”

Neighbors said Estes is well loved in the quiet neighborhood where she has lived for about 20 years.

“Everybody up and down the street thinks the world of her,” said an 84-year-old neighbor who did not want to be identified. Estes collects clothes for Children’s Hospital of Orange County, brings food to sick people and once fed a man who showed up on her doorstep unable to speak English but obviously hungry, she said.

“If the (robber) had left her alone, she’d given him anything,” Dehlinger said. “She probably would have made him dinner if he wanted it.”

Garcia was booked at the Anaheim jail on suspicion of attempted murder, and bail was set at $250,000. Police said they are skeptical about his identity and are running a fingerprint check on him.