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“Did you see the look on Debbie’s face?” Mike, the investigating officer, commented.

“It looks as if she enjoyed it”. Bart said as both of them were scrutinizing the CCTV recording.

Debbie was a grandmother of five, born in Oklahoma, raised in Oklahoma, and lived her entire life in the sleepy and serene state of Oklahoma.

Her first experience with a violent crime of any nature was when she was six. She had squeezed herself in the narrow passage, from the second floor of her house to the attic. From her location, she could see down the stairs through the small holes in the attic made by woodpecker birds, who nested there during the summer.

Four men had entered the young Debbie’s house and tied her parents and her two brothers to the chair. They looted the house and the little jewelry that Debbie’s mom had, and on the way out: they shot her entire family.

After the incident, Uncle Joe and Aunt Marie decided to raise Debbie. They were a nice couple who had a child named Matt. Uncle Joe locked up their own house in Arizona and came to Oklahoma to take care of Debbie and her 32-acre pea farm.

Matt, Debbie’s cousin, ended up joining the army when he was 19 and married a beautiful Vietnamese girl and settled in Irving CA. After Debbie married at 23, uncle Joe and Aunt Marie felt that they had accomplished their life mission and went to stay with son Matt. They had already sold their Arizona house five years after they moved to Oklahoma to take care of Debbie.

Debbie had a very rewarding and fulfilling life with her husband Daniel. They were married for over 57 years now. Daniel took care of Debbie’s pea farm and his own farm which he inherited from his parents. Debbie and Daniel had 2 kids, both daughters, Sarah and Suzzanne. Sarah was a programmer with a start-up venture, living in the bay area while Suzzanne was an attorney with a law firm in Manhattan.

Sarah came to visit in the summer with her two children and her husband. She had set up CCTV cameras outside as well as a monitoring system inside the house. Debbie and Daniel could video chat with her at the press of a button. She also gave them a locket to wear which sends out distress signals to both the police and Sarah in case of an emergency like one of them falling in the bathroom.

Then one day it happened. Debbie had been fearing this day since she saw the murder of her parents when she was six. Daniel had come home from the farm and was having his soup. Daniel at his age could not do any physical work at the farm like he used to, but he still insisted on going there every day to see what was happening at the farm. His farm manager sat with him for hours as Daniel talked about the old days, sipping his Budweiser.

Two men armed with a rifle gun knocked on the door. Daniel thought it was his manager George who had come to drop his reading glasses which he had left at the farm while signing some checks. The armed men pushed Daniel aside, and he fell to the ground. As soon as he fell, he pressed the button in his locket sending the signal to the local police station as well as Sarah.

When Mike and Bart, the two cops on duty, arrived at the scene for the crime 12 minutes later, everything was over. They saw two corpses lying in the house. Next to them was the rifle gun stationed on the floor.

Debbie saw the killers every night in her dreams until her early teens. The shiny bracelet on the killer’s hand as he pulled the trigger, gleamed. She was in therapy. In school, Debbie got straight A’s in all her subjects. She took up shooting as a hobby in high school, and it became her passion. She visualized many times shooting the four men who took her parent’s life. Those men were never arrested.

When Debbie heard two men pushing Daniel to the ground, she was in the kitchen. She was mixing a salad for Daniel’s dinner. She knew something was wrong. She got up on the barstool in the kitchen, reached on top of the cabinets, and pulled out the 0.32 pistol that she had hidden there, out of the reach of her grandchildren.

From the kitchen, she saw Daniel lying on the floor and two men with their back turned toward her that were pointing a rifle at Daniel. She fired all the ammo she had in the pistol, killing both the intruders before they had a chance to look back. Daniel looked up in shock. By the time the police came, it was all over. Debbie did not let history repeat itself.