Umberton -  One mother put an emergency sound alarm to very good use. Allison Reynolds, mother of two, had finished a quick shift in Walmart and was sitting in her car warming up the engine and checking the messages on her phone when an intruder opened the passenger door and stepped in. It was her keychain alarm that saved the day.   

Allison, whose husband Jim works for United Trucking and is away for weeks at a time, was doing a last-minute diaper run. She tells us she was always nervous about going shopping alone. “John is away working for weeks at a time, and I’m left managing on my own. I hate going out in the evening alone, but sometimes, there’s no way around it.”

Thursday evening Allison put the last diaper on baby Pete at bedtime. “I had no idea I was running low, till I reached into the drawer and there was just one left.” she says. After putting the boys to sleep, she says she asked her elderly neighbor to watch them for twenty minutes while she ran out to pick up diapers.

“I was only in the store five minutes,” she relates, “And when I came out, I took my phone out and checked my messages. I wanted to know if Lynne had messaged, if the boys had woken up. There weren’t any messages from her, but there was one from Jim, and I sat there for a few minutes chatting before starting the car.”

It turned out to be an ill-timed few minutes.  She was startled by the sound of her passenger door opening, and before she had a chance to react someone was sitting in the passenger seat. “I never got a good look at his face,” she says. She felt, rather than saw, that the intruder was a large-bodied male, and she caught a whiff of tobacco in his coat when he reached over, closed the child lock, and picked up the phone she had dropped on her lap. 

He only spoke three words, she remembered. “Start the engine.” 

The alarm was still sounding 60 seconds later when security investigated the noise. She was able to point out the direction the intruder had run away, and someone helped her find the pin used to quiet the alarm. “There’s no way to silence this thing once it begins to sound, other than to stick the little pin back in the slot. That’s how I knew I was going to be alright, once I remembered I had this with me.”  Allison explains. “Even if that guy hadn’t run off immediately, I knew he would realize he had no chance once he saw there was no way to silence the alarm.”