The popular word game Wordle might be the reason an elderly Chicago woman survived a dangerous home invasion.
80-year-old Denyse Holt was sleeping in her bed last weekend when she was suddenly awakened by a naked man holding a pair of scissors in her bedroom. The naked intruder, later identified by Lincolnwood, Chicago police to be 32-year-old James H. Davis III, had broken into Holt’s home at around 1 a.m. and proceeded to hold the woman hostage. According to Chicago’s local CBS 2, Holt told the station that the man then got in bed with her and told her to stay calm.
“I was trying to survive that’s all,” Holt said. “He said ‘I won’t harm you or molest you.’”
Holt then said that Davis would eventually ask her to get into the bathtub with him, fully clothed, and later went to her basement bathroom where he barricaded them inside for roughly 17 hours. It wasn’t until Holt’s daughter noticed that her mother had not been responding to her texts or sending her daily Wordle score that she began to think something was wrong.
“I didn’t send my older daughter a Wordle in the morning. And that was disconcerting to her,” Holt said. Her daughter, Meredith Holt-Caldwell, who lives across the country in Seattle, noticed this as well and got a family friend to call the police.
Lincolnwood police and the SWAT team later arrived and apprehended Davis. Holt commented that she feels “very lucky” to have survived the ordeal because she thought she would be murdered in her own home. Police believe Davis to have some kind of mental illness and he is currently in custody.
The Holt family hopes this extreme scenario acts as a reminder for everyone to check in on their loved ones, whether it be with Wordle scores or other means.
