A Mom Explains Why She Took Her Dog But Not Her Kids When Burglars Broke Into Her House
She did the best she could to protect her kids.
Reshentnikov_art | Shutterstock After two burglars broke into her home and threatened to kill her, a brave mother managed to escape to her front porch and use her Ring camera to signal her husband for help.
However, people could not help but notice that the woman’s kids were nowhere in sight and that she only had her dog tucked in her arms on Ring camera video footage.
After she faced criticism from viewers, the mother defended her decision to leave the kids inside, calling it the right thing to do.
The mom took her dog with her and left her two kids inside while she got help after two burglars broke into her home.
Harrowing Ring camera video footage posted on TikTok showed Leah Amberly wearing nothing but a bath towel as she frantically tried to contact her husband, Jake, who was at work.
Shaking with fear, she told him to call the police as two burglars had broken into their home. “I begged them not to hurt the kids!” she said.
Although terrifying, Leah's experience is quite common. According to FBI data, burglary is the third most common crime in the United States, with larceny taking the top spot and motor vehicle theft in spot number two.
However, most viewers noticed that Leah’s two young sons were not with her and that she was holding the family’s small dog in her arms while begging her husband to call for help.
Naturally, they were bewildered by the mom's willingness to leave her children alone in the house with the burglars, even if she was just outside on the front porch.
“She left the kids inside but took the dog?!?” one TikTok user commented. “Why would she leave the kids alone??” another wrote.
In a follow-up video, Leah explained why she chose to leave her two young sons, who were asleep in their beds, inside the house while she fled to her front porch to signal her husband for help.
According to Leah, after she put the kids to bed, she went into the bathroom to take a bath. While she was in the tub, she said she heard “loud stomping” coming from upstairs. Initially believing that it might be her husband, Leah checked her phone to check his location.
Just as she realized that her husband was still at work, the bathroom door knob began to jiggle violently. Before she could even process what was happening, two men wearing ski masks broke down the door.
“I just look at them and go, ‘Here’s my purse, here’s my phone, take anything you want, just don’t hurt my babies,’” Leah recalled.
One of the men, who brandished a gun, threatened Leah that if she moved, he would shoot her before taking her cell phone.
After the two men took off down the stairs, Leah raced into her toddler son’s room and told her Alexa device to call the police.
However, the Alexa device loudly informed the mom that if there was an emergency, she needed to call the police. Fortunately, she was able to sneak into her bedroom and set off her alarm system in hopes of scaring off the burglars.
“I don’t want to grab my kids and run downstairs because I don’t want them to get hurt in any way,” Leah explained.
“My dog was with me at the time and I grabbed him because I didn’t want him running out. I figured that they [the burglars] had broken in somehow, and I didn’t want him getting away.”
After Leah made it out onto the porch and notified her husband to call the police, she ran back inside with her dog to get her sleeping children.
Thankfully, no one was hurt, and once the police arrived, they discovered that nothing in the house had been taken and found Leah’s phone underneath a pillow.
However, the mother said that she is sick of the false narrative being spread that she left her kids behind.
Given that the man threatened to shoot her if she moved, Leah says that she was “so sure” that one of them was going to pull a gun on her once he noticed her running outside to the front porch and did not want to put her children in that position.
She figured that, at the moment, the safest place for them would be in their cribs.
“I didn’t wanna risk my kids getting hurt while I went to get them help,” she says in a follow-up video.
“I did what I had to do to save them. And I obviously did the right thing.”
It is easy to cast judgment upon someone and assume that you know the whole story from a 30-second video clip.
However, until you have ever been in a situation where you were threatened with a gun while your children were sleeping in the next room over and had little time to go over your safest escape routes, it is impossible to know what was going through Leah’s mind.
Fear, confusion, and sheer panic make it difficult for someone to think rationally, and everyone reacts differently to traumatic situations.
Leah did the very best she could to protect her children with little time to think, and jumped into action to signal for help while putting herself at risk.
Not only was she brave enough to protect her sleeping children, but her dog as well!
She truly is a supermom, and instead of being criticized, she deserves praise for her quick thinking.
Megan Quinn is a writer at YourTango who covers entertainment and news, self, love, and relationships.