Ozzy Osbourne and his wife, Sharon, were awoken at their country mansion early Monday by burglars taking jewelry, and a scuffle sent one of the intruders plummeting from a second-floor window, police said.
The burglary took place at about 4am in Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire, a county bordering London, at the home of the former Black Sabbath frontman and current reality television star.
PHOTO: AP
The Osbournes were woken by the break-in and "a man" grabbed one of the burglars before the intruder broke free and jumped from a 9m-high second-floor window, police said. They would not say whether the unidentified defender was Ozzy, perhaps best known to audiences around the world for biting the head off a live bat on stage.
He and his wife are staying at the mansion while she appears on the British TV talent show The X-Factor. Their children were not in the house at the time. His daughter, Kelly, was in Vancouver, Canada, and his son, Jack, was in Los Angeles, police said.
Jay Marose, the family's spokesman in the US, said that he spoke to Mrs Osbourne on the phone on Monday night, and that neither she nor Ozzy had been hurt.
"Ozzy and Sharon were in the house. They were woken up by the incident eventually. My understanding is that the intruder was discovered in ... Sharon's dressing room," adjoining the main bedroom, Marose said.
He declined to say whether the man who struggled with the intruder was Ozzy.
Marose didn't know the value of the stolen jewelry, but said he was sure it has "financial and sentimental value."
One of the burglars wore a ski mask and used a ladder to climb into the second-floor room of the mansion where a "large amount of jewelry" was stolen, police said.
Both burglars apparently escaped in a van, and the man who jumped was probably injured by the fall, police said.
The break-in was the latest misadventure for the Osbournes, who were thrust back into the public spotlight following the success of their eponymous reality TV show.
Last December, Ozzy spent eight days in a coma after breaking his collarbone, six ribs and a vertebra in a quadbike accident at the Buckinghamshire estate.
Changes, his duet with daughter Kelly, topped the charts in the weeks following the accident as Ozzy made his recovery.
Sharon battled cancer last year, and she saw her US talk show axed earlier this year. But she has since bounced back as a judge on The X-Factor alongside Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell.
On Friday night, the couple appeared together on the British Broadcasting Corp's Children In Need show, an annual fund-raising charity extravaganza for disadvantaged children.
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