(NM) Woman killed would-be rapist in self defense
Awakened by an Attacker
Woman Tells Story of Being Attacked While She Was Sleeping

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/GoodMoningAmerica/GMA020819Self_defense_woman.html

Aug. 19, 2002 – It has to be every person’s worst nightmare – waking
up from a deep sleep to find a stranger standing over you. But it really
happened to an Albuquerque woman who overpowered and killed a convicted
rapist after he broke into her home, climbed into her bed and held a gun
to her chest.

The woman, who wishes to be identified only as “Mira,” is a single mom
and bookkeeper in her early 30s who said she acted only on instinct, and
was driven by the desire to survive.

She told Good Morning America that she was home alone and was asleep in
her bedroom about 1:30 a.m. on July 20 when she woke to find a
flashlight pointed toward her face and a masked man straddling her in
bed.

“After going to sleep, I was in the dead of sleep, I woke up with a man
on top of me,” Mira said on GMA. I immediately just had the reaction to
get him off of me at that point he told me he had a gun and I felt it
against my left chest. He was restraining me with both of his hands and
the gun was across my chest and I just took my left hand and I started
just pushing it away from me.”

Mira started trying to push him off with her hands and feet, using some
martial arts and self-defense techniques that she had learned years
before.

“Do you want to die?” he asked.

At that point, something snapped and she sprung into action, Mira said.
In what she described as something like “a dream state,” she wrestled
the .38-caliber revolver away from her 170-pound attacker and and rolled
him onto the floor. She fired three shots at the man, striking him twice
in the upper torso.

Convicted Sex Offender

The woman and police learned later that the man was 51-year-old Michael
Magirl of Albuquerque, a convicted sex offender. Almost 20 years ago he
was convicted of 33 burglaries in Clovis, N.M., where he raped a female
Air Force captain while her children slept in an adjacent room. He only
served half of a 31-year sentence.

Police say Magirl’s car was parked about two blocks from the woman’s
home, and he had “rapist tools” with him, including a flashlight,
gloves, and duct tape. Officers seized a backpack, a pillowcase and
binoculars from the car.

Mira had just bought a home in Albuquerque, and was in the process of
moving on the night it happened.

There had been a lot of workers in and out of the one-story house
earlier that day, as she was in the process of moving in. She climbed
into bed around 11:30 p.m. that night, after checking each door and
window to make sure that they were locked. Police say that Magirl
appeared to have forced his way into Mira’s home through a sliding glass
door, where pry marks were found.

After Mira fired the gun, she thought she had only injured Magirl. She
pulled off his pantyhose mask, so she would be able to identify him,
before running to a neighbor’s house to call police.

Magirl died at the scene, and police have classified his death as a
justifiable homicide. Police are now investigating Magirl in connection
with other unsolved attacks in Albuquerque.

http://www.robertwaters.net