A man climbed onto the roof of a Los Angeles home and wouldn’t come down for several hours on Tuesday until an 83-year-old resident scaled the building and threw him off.
Police tried to get the man down from Wilford Burgess’s roof in La Puente, and after several hours without success, Burgess took matters into his own hands.
Cell phone video taken by La Puente resident Ashley Wrenn shows her grandfather approaching the intruder on the roof, grabbing him and shoving him off.
Grainy cellphone footage shows the man standing on the roof and refusing to come down. The homeowner Wilford Burgess takes matters into his own hands and climbs on the roof himself
Burgess approaches the man and wrestles him into a corner before throwing him off the roof
The sheriff’s station got a call from someone at 6.34am that morning saying they were being followed, according to the police.
When deputies arrived at the scene, they saw a man jumping from roof to roof.
The man ended up on Wrenn and Burgess’s roof. Crisis negotiators were called in to help get him down.
Wrenn said she woke up around 7am she heard the deputies yelling: ‘We know where you are. We can see you’, as the man stomped and ran on the roof.
Wrenn and a crisis negotiator both tried to convince the man to come down.
‘I told him we don’t want him hurt, just want him off the roof,’ Wrenn said.
After the standoff had gone on for five hours, a neighbor grabbed a ladder and Burgess used it to climb onto the roof.
‘My grandfather was so upset. [He] told him, ‘You need to get down and off my roof,” Wrenn told The Mercury News.
‘He’d been up there too long,’ Burgess told KTLA. ‘I figured … if they can’t get him off, I can.’
Wilford Burgess, pictured, was tired of waiting for the man to come down and didn’t think the police were going to be able to persuade him to after so many hours
Burgess cornered the man on the roof and threw him off. When he landed he damaged Wrenn’s mother’s car, she said.
The man was taken to a hospital for psychological evaluation after sheriff’s deputies took him into custody.
‘It was a crazy morning,’ Wrenn said.
Wrenn said she isn’t surprised her elderly grandfather did what he did.
‘He’s like the strongest person in our family. I mean, he keeps us all together … it wasn’t a surprise to us. That’s papa,’ she told KTLA, laughing.
It is not clear why the man was on the roof in the first place.