Victim Is Feeling Pretty Fortunate : Crime: Mission Viejo man survives shootout with burglar that left him with 4 gunshot wounds.

He has four fresh gunshot wounds scattered over his body, a bullet still lodged in his back and a shattered left thigh, but Tom Prince considered himself a lucky man Tuesday.

Prince, 49, survived a frightening shootout with at least two would-be burglars outside his Lake Forest home Monday night. But just barely.

“I have to think if I had not turned to my left when the guy yelled, I would have been hit right in the chest,” said Prince, who is recuperating in the Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center intensive care unit. Pointing to an open bullet wound, he added, “Instead, he got me in the arm.”

According to Prince’s own testimony and police reports, he and his wife, Gail, spent Monday evening as they have so many others in the 3 1/2 years they have lived on quiet Jeronimo Lane in the Woods housing tract. They went to bed early--about 8:30 p.m.--and were dozing off when the phone rang.

The Princes did not bother to answer it and no message was left on the machine. Prince, a design engineer for Bechtel Corp., now believes that might have been a clue.

“Maybe they were checking to see if we were home,” he said. Since he had been in Washington on business for the past three months, and his wife had been traveling, perhaps burglars had been casing their home, he said.

Only minutes later and the phone call forgotten, Prince had fallen asleep when his wife spotted the glow of flashlights searching from the back yard through a window into their upstairs hall.

She nudged Prince, who grabbed a loaded, .38-caliber, Smith & Wesson revolver he keeps near the bed and crept toward the upstairs hallway. Outside, on the back yard patio, were two shadowy figures.

Figuring he might be able to surprise the men, Prince went out the front door to the porch, only to be confronted by a muscular man running directly at him. With little time to think, Prince backed up a step on the porch and raised his gun.

“I said, ‘Stop or I’ll shoot!’ but the guy didn’t slow down a bit,” Prince said. “I fired off a round. I think maybe I hit the guy but I don’t know. He would have run over me if I hadn’t shot.”

The burglar, who was dressed in long pants and either a tank top or no shirt at all, kept running right past the porch and onto the driveway, where he stumbled briefly and then continued on. Prince, still shooting, chased the burglar out into the cul-de-sac in front of their home and yelled at him to freeze.

“He had fallen down, kind of on his hands and knees, and I said, ‘Put your hands over your head or I’ll shoot,’ ” Prince said. Instead the man shouted, and when Prince turned to see who he was yelling to, shots rang out.

Events became a whirlwind of confusion at that point, Prince said.

“I don’t know if he was trying to distract me or what, all I heard was the gunshots,” Prince said, adding that he believes it was the man on the ground who pulled out a gun and shot him.

“I didn’t feel anything until the bullet hit me and I felt something like a kick in the thigh and my leg just gave out,” he said. “I knew I was hurt when I put my hand on the wound and felt the blood.”

The burglar ran off as Prince tried to drag himself toward his house. Then a neighbor drove up the street and several others came out of their houses.

Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the scene just before 9:30 p.m., according to a report from Lt. Richard Olson. Two men were seen by neighbors running down Jeronimo Lane toward Jeronimo Road before they disappeared, Olson said.

Because one of the men might have suffered gunshot wounds, Sheriff’s Department investigators have notified area hospitals to be on the lookout.

None of Prince’s injuries are considered life-threatening, a hospital spokeswoman said. He was scheduled to undergo surgery Tuesday afternoon to repair his left thigh, she said.

Prince, a native of Houston who learned to shoot by hunting with his father while growing up, is not concerned about keeping a gun in the house. “We don’t have children, so I’m not worried about that,” he said.

But he wouldn’t go outside after burglars again.

“I wish I hadn’t gone out the front door, that’s for sure.”