Nineteen-year-old Ann Cohn said she was literally four feet away from her window when the would-be burglar attempted to get into her bedroom. She is grateful for her dog Kona, who, she believes scared him away.

“This window was open,” Ann said as she sat on her bed, pushed, flush, up against the wall next to the window. “(The glass windows were) wide open and someone could have easily come through and I was sitting right here. It was a little scary… I mean he literally could’ve reached through and grabbed me I was so close.”

Only she and her brother Jack were home when it happened Wednesday afternoon.

“I was just sitting on my bed, on my phone, reading something. I could hear a lot of noise going on outside, a lot of banging. It sounded like wood being knocked around. I just wasn’t paying attention to it because the neighbors are so close next-door and the garage is right there. I just figured they were doing something in the garage,” Ann explained.

Ann later learned that the banging she and her brother heard was the would-be burglar knocking down pieces of wood underneath her parent’s window, next to her room. He had tried, and failed, to break into their room before moving on to hers. Her parent’s windows were locked. Her glass windows were open, with only the screens blocking the entry to the room.

She admitted she wasn’t really paying attention until she heard her screen being ripped off. “My curtains were drawn so I couldn’t actually see anything, but soon as the screen was ripped off I sort of froze,” she said.

That’s when her dog Kona starting barking.

“(Kona) has a scary bark and Jack had spoken to her after she had barked so he figured out that someone was home. And that was the only thing that kept him from coming through the window,” Ann said.

Ann immediately texted her father.

“My heart really sank into my stomach. It’s a feeling of being violated and it’s never a message that you wanna get. I dropped everything and left my office and drove straight home to try and figure out what was going on and make sure that my kids were okay,” said Brian Cohn, Ann’s father.

He said nothing like that had ever happened to them before. He was even more surprised at when it happened.

“This was just in the afternoon on Wednesday,” Brian exclaimed. “So it was in the middle of the day. The sun was out. Just not the time when you expect something like this happens.”

Statistics on security websites show that 65% of burglaries happen between 6a.m. and 6p.m., a time when many people are at work.

In October, seven out of the 11 burglaries reported in Kailua happened between those hours, according to the HPD crime mapping website.

“My gut feeling is that they simply saw that it looked like nobody was home, you can’t really see down the side of the house, and thought, might as will give it a shot, because they really did just move from window to window. The only reason I believe that they left was because they heard a dog barking,” Brian said.

The Cohn family said they feel lucky and are grateful to Kona.

“Kona is very protective of us and the house and she has a pretty fierce bark…I think she definitely took care of us the other day…I’m absolutely certain that she scared off whoever it was,” said Brian.

The police are investigating the attempted burglary.

“The police came almost immediately. They responded very quickly. They came and took statements from both the kids, actually dusted for prints on the screen and on the gate,” Brian said.

Jack, Ann’s younger brother did get a quick look at the perpetrator as he passed by his bedroom window. He described him as a male, average build, 5’8″ to 5’9″, with short dark hair, wearing a purple t-shirt.

Anyone with any information is asked to contact the police.



For now, the Cohn family is taking additional precautions to prevent anything like this from happening again.