Updated Sunday at 4:15 p.m.: Revised to include more details.

A woman shot a man in the head as he tried to steal her SUV with her two children inside Wednesday night, Dallas police say.

An employee of a gas station in the 200 block of West Camp Wisdom Road, near the border with Duncanville, alerted the mother about 10 p.m. that a man was trying to get into her SUV.

Ricky Wrigh

The mother, identified by KDFW-TV (Channel 4) as Michelle Booker-Hicks, told the station she had been paying for gas at the time.

She jumped into the vehicle. When the man didn't stop, she pulled a gun from the glove box and shot him in the head, police said.

The vehicle then crashed into a utility pole.

Booker-Hicks told KDFW she had recently gotten the gun to defend herself.

"I had to do what I had to do to defend what was mine, which are my kids," she told KXAS-TV (NBC5).

She said she told the man her children were in the back seat and to pull over but he didn't listen, so she went to the glove compartment and grabbed the gun.

The suspect, 36-year-old Ricky Wright, was taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening. He was booked into the Dallas County Jail on Saturday and faces a charge of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.

"Just to see him slumped over like I was just like, Lord, my kids [are] in the car," the woman told KXAS, adding that they saw her shoot someone.

The woman and her children, ages 2 and 4, were not injured, police said.

The victim, who does not currently face charges, had stern words for the suspect.

"I should have just have emptied the whole clip but I didn't. I didn't. I just wanted to give him a warning shot that was it," the woman told KTVT-TV (Channel 11). "I'm not a killer or anything like that, but I do believe in defending what's mine."