Chelsea Putnam knew that her job put her in dangerous situations. As the manager of George’s Tavern in downtown Sanford, Florida, it was her job to close and lock the business in the early morning hours.
It was Thursday morning around 2 a.m. when Chelsea called her veteran boyfriend to let him know she was about to close the bar. Thankfully, he was there waiting in the parking lot when she set the alarms and turned the lock on the back door.
She never saw her attacker.
The stranger was hiding in a portable toilet that happened to be in the parking lot next to Chelsea’s car. He is believed to have been waiting there for hours, and he leaped from the toilet and attacked her from behind as she reached for her keys.
Security video showed that Chelsea dropped her keys and purse next to her car when she was assaulted. The attacker, who was wearing gloves, reportedly grabbed her by the throat and forced her to the ground. He struck her head to the pavement several times and ripped open the front of her blouse.
She said the violent criminal wrapped his hands around her throat and started strangling her. “He wouldn’t let me go and I kind of let out a scream. He got me on the ground, started bashing my head in, rip my shirt.” Death seemed to be waiting for her.
That, thankfully, did not happen. The boyfriend quickly exited his vehicle and fired several shots at the attacker, who then ran. He found Chelsea covered with bruises and mud from the vicious assault, and someone then called 911.
When law enforcement arrived, they found the attacker dead in the back of the parking lot. Officials called it an attempted carjacking, though the intended victim believes the assailant’s intentions may have been for more than just her car.
She noted that when her purse and keys hit the ground next to her car, “he just kept on attacking me. That’s why I don’t think it was a carjacking.” Chelsea said the man watched her in the bar for hours.
Putnam’s father told local media that his daughter suffered mild head injuries in the assault. As George’s Tavern customer Al Moon remarked, “Thank God her boyfriend is a special ops guy and came out and saved her life.”
Chelsea described her hero as “173rd Airborne. He’s my angel, he’s my saving grace. Like I said, if it wasn’t for him, I’d be dead, and I wouldn’t be going home to my three kids.”
The heroic boyfriend does not face charges, and Chelsea said she intends to return to work. She also gets the privilege of continuing to be mother to her three children.
Some jobs are inherently dangerous, and closing down a bar or any type of business late at night can make a person a target. Chelsea was smart to call her boyfriend, though it is not likely that he would be there every night to protect her from harm.
There were security cameras present, and the police undoubtedly were there within minutes. But again, it’s another case of an armed good guy — a civilian — who saved someone from a likely tragic end.
These are the stories, and this is the narrative that deserves telling and retelling. If left to the mainstream media, all anyone would know is that guns are used by criminals to prey on the innocent. Politicians now call the Second Amendment a “suicide pact” and work for it to be dismantled.
Instead, all the precious freedoms enshrined in the Constitution deserve full protection. As one lucky bar manager can attest, without the freedom to keep and bear arms, her life would have been forever changed or even ended in the early morning hours in a lonely parking lot.
