Wordle Saves a Grandmother From Hostage Situation With Armed, Naked, and Bloodied Home Invader
Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images.
An 80-year-old woman enduring a terrifying hostage ordeal was rescued after her daughter alerted police something was wrong — because she hadn’t yet sent her answer for the day’s Wordle puzzle.
Denyse Holt, a resident of Chicago’s Lincolnwood neighborhood, was awoken in the middle of the night to a naked, bleeding man creeping into her bedroom. He had cut himself on the glass shards when he broke a window to get into her home.
The man ordered her to take a shower with him and then a bath, dragging the grandmother through the house in her soaking wet nightgown as he unplugged phones and left a trail of blood behind him.
He eventually barricaded her in a basement bathroom with a chair, leaving her alone in the dark for 17 hours as she marched in place and did stretching exercises to try to stay warm.
“He took two knives from my kitchen. He told me he liked those,” she told CBS Chicago.
In the meantime, in Seattle, Holt’s daughter Meredith Holt-Caldwell was getting worried when her mother hadn’t sent her any messages about the popular Wordle puzzle, as was her habit, and texts were going unread.
“I didn’t send my older daughter a Wordle in the morning. And that was disconcerting to her,” Holt said.
Holt-Caldwell and other friends of Holt’s alerted police, “leading to an hours long standoff” with the man, eventually cutting a hole in a door and using a stun gun on him to capture him.
Holt is reportedly physically unharmed. The man, whose name has not been released, was taken into police custody and believed to have mental health issues.
Watch the video above, via CBS Chicago.
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