Gun Helps Fend Off Intruder

Ron Oatman had considered getting rid of the .38 he kept in his bedroom, afraid his grandchildren would find it and hurt themselves.

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But that was before his Monday night encounter with a black-bearded, bare-chested intruder covered with tattoos and armed with a 4-foot bamboo pole, who had broken into his home claiming to be the Pied Piper.

By Tuesday, Oatman was glad he decided to keep his gun.

“God, his eyes, he looked like the devil,” said Oatman, 57, a retired air-conditioning repairman. “I felt like my life was absolutely, positively in danger.”

The confrontation that ended with gunfire, a chase, a street duel with sticks and a desperate man diving through a neighbor’s bay window began about 9 p.m. Monday with the glimpse of a figure in the kitchen.

Oatman was in the den watching TV. His wife and daughter were out shopping, but his daughter’s boyfriend--Steven Schmidt, 28--had just gone into the living room. Both men noticed that they had unexpected company.

In the kitchen they confronted a man police later identified as Brett Doherty, 31, a Newbury Park transient. Oatman is a heavyset man who said he doesn’t scare easily. But “this guy was nothing normal. If you saw him in the street you’d be scared,” Oatman said. “You see a guy like that in your kitchen . . . it scared the hell out of me.”

He and Schmidt demanded that the man leave, but the intruder brandished a 4-foot bamboo stick and poked Schmidt in the hip, Oatman said.

Oatman ran upstairs and returned with his gun. “Get out of here! I don’t want to shoot you,” he said he told the man, who just waved the stick and ranted about the Bible and the Pied Piper. Oatman said he decided to shoot.

“It’s hard to look in the eyes of a human being and say you are going to kill him,” he said. “I’m very glad I didn’t have to do any more than shoot him in the leg.”

The bullet passed through Doherty’s right thigh, police said, and lodged in a kitchen cabinet.

The men still had to chase the intruder out through the front door, they said, and Schmidt picked up a piece of scrap wood. While Oatman called police, Schmidt confronted the still-raving man in the middle of El Monte Drive.

Using a smattering of martial arts knowledge gained from watching movies and from taking a brief course at a Thousand Oaks tae kwon do studio, Schmidt engaged him in a swashbuckler-style stick fight.

“I though he was going to kill me,” Schmidt said. “He looked like Charlie Manson, but really buff and cut-up and tattooed.”

Doherty finally abandoned the fight and bolted toward a neighbor’s house, where he tried the front door and then dived through the front bay window, authorities said. Inside, Doherty allegedly started going wild, trashing the living room of Frances and Oliver Kimball, authorities said.

Oatman was back outside by this time, and followed the man through the window. He stood guard with his gun until sheriff’s deputies arrived.

Doherty was arrested on suspicion of burglary, illegal entry, assault with a deadly weapon, and being under the influence of a controlled substance, said Detective Joe Braga of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. He was being held Tuesday at the Ventura County Jail in lieu of $20,000 bail.

Braga said the events were still under investigation, but said it appears that Oatman and Schmidt acted in self-defense.

“Obviously, they feared for their life,” Braga said.

While hesitating to second-guess Oatman’s actions, Braga warned that firing a warning shot into the sky, as Oatman did while Schmidt tussled with Doherty, is a bad idea.

“It’s never safe to fire them up into the air. Some innocent person could get hit,” Braga said. “What goes up must come down.”

Oliver Kimball, 77, praised Oatman’s efforts. “I wish he’d killed him,” Kimball said, surveying a blood-stained living room full of broken glass.

Oatman, however, said he was glad he did not have to do any more than wound the intruder.

“I wasn’t following him like a vigilante,” Oatman said. “Mainly, I wanted to know where he went because I wanted him captured.”

Doherty was so enraged, investigators said, that deputies had to use pepper spray to subdue him. They said that before he was taken to jail, he went to Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, where he refused anesthesia while doctors stitched his gunshot wound.