The Dread Ordeal of Home Invasion

Home invasions are dreaded situations. They may not occur often, but when they do they often end with dreadful consequences for someone.

Their purpose often is to effect a theft by thugs who simply don't care if someone is at home at the time they make their forced entry, but not always. There are times when home invasions occur as an attempt - always successful - to intimidate, to terrify. And there are times when those who have set out to do just that for a definite purpose at a particular address aiming at a specific individual, in error enter someone else's home entirely.

"I just wanted to die at that point. I was bleeding and felt I could do nothing. I was thinking of Amalie. She was downstairs and something was happening to her. I had a feeling he was probably going to kill us both", recounted 47-year-old Francois Renaud, describing bleeding, lying in his bed, 20 stab wounds to his arms, legs and body immobilizing him. "I knew she was getting stabbed or something. He came back to the room and there was fresh blood on the knife."

And he was right. Something was happening to his wife. She had been placed on a chair in the basement of their house, duct-taped tightly, binding her to the chair. And their assailant, 23-year-old Richard Keith Blake, slit her throat.

It was 2:30 in the morning of the day of their wedding anniversary when Mr. Renaud heard a sound in the kitchen and went to investigate, finding the window screen sliced open.  And then he was confronted with someone wearing gloves, holding a box cutter and butcher knife.

As Mr. Renaud fled before the man threatening him, he was being repeatedly slashed. He ended up falling back into his bed, bleeding, when his wife was roused from sleep, asking what was happening. "Are you the Sandersons or Andersons?" asked the intruder. "If it's not us. Why don't you leave?" asked Amalie Thomas, Mr. Renaud's wife. "My boss won't like it", responded their assailant. And he took Amalie Thomas out of the bedroom, down to the basement.

Mr. Renaud recounted his pain and his fear and his final determination to escape, to find help. As he attempted to leave the house, after freeing himself from the ties and duct tape binding his head, arms and legs, the intruder confronted him, saying "where do you think you're going? If you leave I'm going to kill her." And then he stabbed Mr. Renaud two more times in his torso, ordering him back upstairs.

"You see what happens when you make [him] mad?" as though he were talking of a second person. "He said if we called the police, he'd kill everyone in our family." But he did manage to escape, he did manage to raise an alarm and the intruder was arrested soon afterward as police saw him driving the couple's stolen vehicle, and he was cornered hiding in a tree by a police dog after crashing the car and running into woods.

He has pleaded not guilty to two counts each of attempted murder, aggravated assault, forcible confinement and robbery and single counts of break and enter and failing to stop for police. The DNA of all three was found on the floor of the stolen SUV, along with bloody gloves and the box-cutter.