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AUSTIN, Texas - A Travis Country homeowner describes the terrifying moment a man with a machete was pounding on her door.
"We heard like a banging sound and it wasn't a knocking. At first it was like one, two and then it was a constant bang," she said. "We were scared; we didn't have a way to defend ourselves. What are we going to do with our kids? What if he gets in the house and where did he go?"
The woman said she called police around 5:48 a.m. to report the disturbance. The unwanted visitor didn't stop there he continued to bang on other neighbor’s doors, screaming for help. His screams woke up Stephen O’Neal and his wife.
"I thought she was just waking me up to check on the baby but when I heard the panic in her voice I sprung out of bed,” O’Neal said. "When I looked out the window I could see a man sitting in the middle of the street rocking back and forth, screaming."
O’Neal said he went to check on the man but he immediately jumped up. His wife screamed for him to come back inside. The two called police to report the man in need of help until the man began banging on their door,
That's when it dawned me what this was not somebody in danger but they were trying to get in our home," O’Neal said. "He started throwing his body against the door. It was like out of a horror movie where you see the doorknob turning and the frame shaking as someone throws their body up against it over and over again."
O’Neal and his wife used their backs to hold up the door, told their children to hide upstairs and waited for help to arrive. Police arrived around 6:12 a.m. about 23 minutes after the first 911 call was made.
"For the police to take a half hour to respond to a 911 call where someone is armed and trying to break into people's homes. I don't think that's a reasonable response time," said O ‘Neal. "I don't know what I thought I was going to do, I just wanted to make sure that the guy was safe and in the end I guess it was me and my family that wasn't safe."
APD detained the man and searched for his machete. O’ Neal said the machete was found near their trashcans. Police were told by another neighbor they saw the man wielding it down the street.
Cynthia Cox has lived in the Travis Country neighborhood for more than 15-years she said she has seen a rise in crime in the area.
"It's a close knit neighborhood where people look out for each other,” Cox said. "It seems to me that they have increased and the response time of police has decreased and we've had serious incidents."
An officer returned to the first 911 caller's home to collect evidence later in the morning.
"He told me that I called at shift change and it would've taken longer to dispatch someone from a different area,” the neighbor said. "I wish that they had just responded quicker."
The Austin Police Department confirmed they received several calls for service but could not comment on response