Two carpenters survive “death by hammer”.

This particular job was in a really nice part of Dallas, Texas in a really nice residential neighborhood. Two carpenters were working in a nice expensive home that was being built. And it was during the day, during the week, plenty of traffic outside, plenty of people going by outside. You would never expect anything to go wrong in a day and place like that.

In a neighborhood like that, this just wouldn’t occur to you. But these two carpenters are in there working, and this bad guy just wanders in, picks up a hammer, and starts threatening them with it. Saying, “I’m going to cave your heads in. I’m going to kill you if you don’t give me your money.”

And with them being pretty smart, they said, yeah, you can have our money, no problem. And so they gave him the money, and they were hoping he was just going to call it quits and go away. But he said, “let’s go into this room over here.” Was it a small closet. The two carpenters glanced at each other, and they knew immediately at the same time, that if they went into that room, they weren’t coming out alive because he was going to take them into that room and cave their heads in.

So they did the only thing they could do and they fought back. They got the hammer back from him and they started wailing on him, and they got the situation under control, got the police called, the cops came, all that kind of stuff. The investigation was done, the scene was released, and we came in to do the cleanup. Now, a cleanup like that can be really tedious and time consuming because it’s a construction site. There’s sawdust on the floor and everywhere.

There’s tools everywhere. There’s lumber everywhere. The sheetrock and parts of the house hadn’t built up yet, so there were studs everywhere, scrap wood, etc. And every little spec, every little centimeter of everything in that room had to be inspected and cleaned and decontaminated. These kind of jobs can take a while.

And the good thing for us is we’re making good money doing that. But I’m just real grateful that in that situation, something you’d never expect in that time of day, something you’d never expect in that neighborhood, that these two guys had that moment of clarity, and they knew they had to fight back or else they’d be dead within a couple of minutes. And fortunately, they did, and they came out alive.