Knoxville woman wakes up to find unknown man inside home

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) — What was a quiet night for Ellen Roy and her family became a scary situation as a man broke into their home.

At 2:15 a.m. on Friday, Knoxville Police officers were dispatched to Half Barrel after I saiah Shuman, 21, was asked to leave the bar and threatened to kill an employee according to KPD. He then made his way down 17th Street before crashing into a retaining wall. That’s when, police said, he ran to the Mechanicsville community and broke into Ellen Roy’s home.

“All of a sudden I heard a crash, bang, boom. I jumped up out of my bed and I saw my son tackling this young man at my front door,” Roy said. “They were bickering back and forth as my son was telling him you gotta get out of my house. So, I got up and looked at the guy’s face and say ‘Who are you, you don’t live here.’ I said to my son ‘Do you know him?’, he said ‘No mom, I’m trying to get him out’.”

She added that while Shuman was in the home, her son was assaulted.

“Somehow he made a move and my son got him in the kitchen,” Roy said. “He literally had my son up against the fridge choking him, choking him out, trying to kill him. Her husband Matt, who’s a bigger guy got a hold of a frying pan and hit him on top of the head. They both got him out of the house, drug him out.”

According to Roy, Shuman was inside the home for more than 30 minutes before he left the area, but it took convincing.

“We were bickering with this guy trying to convince him he’s got to leave my house,” she said. “He kept saying I gotta talk to my brother, I don’t want to hurt anybody. God knows if he got a hold of somebody if he hung up the phone, I would have been the first one he would have grabbed. I don’t know if he would have hurt me or not.”

When Shuman was asked to leave, he simply said he couldn’t go.

“Well, can’t you go? I went over to the door to try and open it and he wouldn’t let me. He said ‘I can’t move, I broke both my ankles,’ Roy said. “I said well you look ok to me, you’re standing on two feet. I said well come here and walk to me, let me see if I can help you. He didn’t move so I said your ankle’s not broken hun and you need to go.”

Police shared that Shuman took a phone from the home before running out the back door of Roy’s home. Shuman is facing several charges including four counts of aggravated kidnapping, three counts of leaving the scene of an accident, and one count of aggravated assault, aggravated burglary and reckless endangerment.

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