'I'm not just the typical granny': 80-year-old shoots, kills intruder By Lindsay Cohen Thursday, May 5th 2016
SULTAN, Wash. (KOMO) - Four shots fired. Three hit the intruder.
It was one surreal moment, says Barb Moles.
"I was just intent upon stopping him. I didn't have any other thought in my head," says Moles. "I just knew I had to stop him."
Moles, 80, was home with her husband, John, and their adult son Thursday night when she says she heard a commotion. She walked into the kitchen and found her husband bleeding on the floor.
John, a retired Boeing worker, had been attacked with a knife and beaten with a crowbar, authorities said. He said three words to his wife: "I've been stabbed."
Barb, a grandmother of eight and great-grandmother of three, walked down the hall and into the master bedroom. She found her .38 caliber pistol -- a Christmas gift from John a few years prior.
She waited behind the door for the intruder to come in. He never did.
She walked into the hallway, she says, where she saw the stranger.
He said one word: "gun."
She shot him four times, hitting her mark three on of them.
"I felt like if I hadn't, my son and I might both be dead and my husband might have bled to death on the kitchen floor," Moles says. "You know, never in my whole life did I ever anticipate having to take another life -- especially at age 80."