When Denyse Holt failed to text her daily Wordle score, her daughter knew something must be wrong.
Hours later a police SWAT team rescued the 80-year-old Chicago woman from a naked home intruder who had been holding her hostage with a pair of scissors.
Holt was alone at home on the evening of Saturday last week when a man broke into her house and pointed the pair of scissors at her.
Photo: Reuters
The man — identified as James H. Davis III, aged 32 — was naked and covered with cuts and blood after he broke a window to gain entrance.
Police suspect Davis has a mental illness.
Holt said that Davis assured her he would not harm her, but he did force her, fully clothed, to take a bath with him before locking her in the basement.
She said that she did stretches and meditative breathing to stay warm and calm.
“I didn’t think I was going to live,” she told the local CBS station.
Holt’s eldest daughter Meredith Holt-Caldwell, who lives in Seattle, first realized that something was amiss when her mother did not send her daily Wordle score.
The game consists of guessing one five-letter word per day in just six tries. Its popularity has skyrocketed since the start of the year, with millions of people playing it daily.
Holt said the missing score was “disconcerting” to her daughter — who knew her mother never missed this part of their daily routine.
After her mother also failed to answer Holt-Caldwell’s text messages, she called the Chicago police.
They conducted a well-being check on her mother on Sunday last week, only to discover she was being held hostage in her own home.
An hours-long standoff between police and Davis ensued. SWAT officers eventually used a stun gun to incapacitate him and rescue Holt.
Police say Davis faces a range of charges including home invasion with a deadly weapon and aggravated kidnapping.
Holt was in shock after her rescue, but otherwise unharmed.
“I never thought in a million years this is what was happening, but it was,” she told CBS. “I’m very lucky.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing
RSS