MANATEE — Ashley Fiero tucked her son Coby, 6, back into bed after a bad dream awakened him early Friday morning. As she soothed him back to sleep she agreed to allow their 1 1/2 year-old pit bull, Hennessey, to curl up next to the frightened little boy.
Less than a half-hour later, Fiero and her fiance, James Kimon, were awakened in their Clark Avenue home by the sound of their front door being kicked in.
“I peeked from the kitchen and could see a figure in the doorway. I ran into my room and hid in the closet with my fiance and my gun. I could hear the dog barking as the intruder beat on the bedroom door,” said Kimon.
Coby and 3-year-old Demetrius Kimon were asleep in their bedrooms.
While the man tried to get into the bedroom, Hennessey attacked. Amid the barking and banging, the couple didn’t hear the gunshot as the intruder tried to fend off the dog but missed his mark. Within a few minutes he had fled.
On Friday afternoon the couple was recovering from the shock of the attack. Demetrius, unfazed by the events of the previous evening, pointed to a chunk of wood missing from a dining room chair damaged by the stray bullet and chimed: “Look what the bad guy did!”
Kimon and Fiero are thankful Hennessey had protected the family. “There was fresh, shiny blood on the smashed bedroom door when we came out,” said Fiero. “The first thing I did when he left was check the kids, they didn’t even wake up.”
Home invasions like this one are counted as robberies in statistics kept by the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office.
Dave Bristow, sheriff’s spokesperson, says robberies for the first six months of this year numbered 220, down from last year’s 243.
“That’s about 9 percent down compared to the first six months of last year,” said Bristow. “The majority are not random,” said Bristow of the most recent robberies. “These are nothing like those high-profile ones from earlier in the year where the victims were beaten. Those have stopped. A lot of these robberies are drug-related or someone knows there’s money at the home.”
Another home invasion reported Friday occurred near Palmetto at about 1:45 a.m. in the 700 block of 20th Lane East.
Four residents in the home were asleep and a teenager was watching television in a back bedroom when two men kicked in the front door.
When the residents came into the front room to investigate the commotion, one of the men put a gun to the head of a woman and demanded money.
The other man knocked the teen to the ground, kicked him and burned him on the neck with a heated spoon.
The men went through drawers in the bedroom and a purse, taking a cell phone and an undetermined amount of cash before they ran away.
On Friday, at the Kimon household in Bradenton, the family was trying to get their house back in order. The front door was fixed and the locks replaced, while a bedroom door hung, smashed, from its hinges.
“When I was sleeping,” said Coby, my dog was protecting me. She’s a good girl.”
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