Sam Krautscheid is a farmer in Washington state, and on Sept. 9 he had just finished a day’s work of baling hay with one of his sons. The day was about to take a pleasant turn as they were headed to an Eric Church concert.
But again, sometimes circumstances take a surprising and dangerous turn.
Krautscheid had just left one of his fields and was to take in the concert. The plan was to grab burgers and relax, but that was before he spotted something unusual. As he drove his pickup truck past a farm store he leases, he saw something troubling.
A small car unexpectedly outside the building.
The farmer turned his pickup around to investigate. He did not like what he saw when he looked in the back seat. On it was “a massage table and a weed eater and some other items that screamed to me, you know, ‘stolen items.’”
Krautscheid did not see the driver or any other people, but the car’s presence warned him that they were likely nearby. He went back to his truck to retrieve and load his gun, and then he called 911 and told authorities that there was likely a burglary ongoing at the store.
“I was approaching the corner of the building, I saw an arm. I saw somebody jumped back and I kind of cleared around the end of the building and there was one individual close to me,” he recalled.
It was then that he saw a second man coming toward him with a billy club. His three sons, including two in fourth and eighth grades, witnessed the confrontation from the truck.
The farmer did what he had prepared to do. He raised his gun, pointed it at the two strangers and loudly told them to get on the ground. The smarter one immediately complied, but the other tried to argue that they were there to rent the property.
“The rear individual got down pretty quickly. The front individual stayed up for quite a bit, was somewhat defiant of the process and made me nervous to the point I felt I was probably a couple of seconds away from having to put one on the ground next to him to try to get them compliant. But thank God, I didn’t have to,” Krautscheid explained.
His boys heard him yelling but did not know the exact nature of the situation. Neither did he, as there was no indication of exactly how many criminals he was dealing with.
Thankfully the defiant alleged burglar used his common sense and got on the ground. That’s where they were when the police arrived some six minutes later.
Arrested were 45-year-old Glenn Richard of Quincy and 28-year-old Jesus Rangel of Mattawa. Investigators found footprints that linked the two men to the attempted burglary, and Krautscheid praised law enforcement for their quick response in the expansive rural area.
He also noted that he was fortunate to be well prepared. “I’m lucky because…I’ve had handgun and self-defense training classes. But in this situation, I was focused on those two individuals. I had four houses and a yard behind me, and a building behind me. I am lucky no one was back there.”
Unfortunately for the two would-be burglars, the building they targeted is in the middle of changing hands and was virtually empty. They could have made off with a few jugs of hand sanitizer that were relics of the pandemic, but there was little of any value.
Krautscheid told an acquaintance afterward that he was too old to be bludgeoned with a billy club. Without his firearm, however, that’s exactly what may have happened.
But thanks to being prepared, the incident had a happy ending. Instead of seeing their father possibly attacked by two criminals, his boys saw him play the role of a hero.
