The day after facing one of the most terrifying moments of her life, Cathy Oliver’s hands shake as she packs loose tobacco into the wrapper of her third cigarette in 20 minutes.
At about 11:30 p.m. Monday, the 57-year-old woman heard someone knocking on the front door of her home on the 4300 block of Ninth Ave. She opened the door to find a man wearing a red bandanna across his face, holding a pump shotgun at his waist and yelling for “Hollywood,” the nickname of her 39-year-old son, John Joy.
Oliver, Joy and Chattanooga police documents say John Paul Dover, 24, tried to force his way into the home.
On Tuesday afternoon, Joy recalled that he heard the commotion at the front door, rushed in and pushed past his mother. That’s when witnesses say Dover pointed the shotgun’s barrel at Joy’s head.
“The gun was on his head and I knocked it down,” Oliver said.
Joy said he grabbed the gun, which had its butt sawn down and black tape wrapped around its body, and began to wrestle for it with Dover. The pair fell onto the porch and the shotgun went off only inches from the side of Joy’s head, the blast leaving a quarter-sized hole in the house.
Still wrestling over the gun, Joy and Dover fell into the front yard, where Joy grabbed the shotgun’s pump mechanism to keep it from firing again. He said he slammed Dover’s arms against the top of a chain-link fence until the gun was dropped.
Joy’s longtime friend, 45-year-old Kennith Stone, was inside the home at the time. He pushed past Oliver and leapt off the porch, colliding with Joy and Dover and driving Dover to the ground, pinning him while they waited for police.
Police records show Dover was arrested and in custody at the Hamilton County Jail Tuesday on charges in connection with the attempted home invasion, which included attempted first-degree murder, aggravated robbery, vandalism, carrying an unlawful weapon and impersonation of a licensed professional.
When Dover was arrested, police found a bondsman’s or possibly a fake law enforcement badge on a chain around his neck.
He has a Hamilton County General Sessions Court appearance scheduled for Nov. 22. His court records show multiple charges, including aggravated assault, dating back to 2005.
Oliver and the others said Dover begged them not to call police but never said why he came to their door with a gun. None of them recalled ever seeing Dover before the incident and said it wasn’t until Tuesday that they learned that he was a relative of a friend who lived up the street.
Already covered in layers of shirts Tuesday, Oliver donned a green bathrobe while Joy and Stone boarded up the broken door from the night before. As her son and his friend swept up glass, she stubbed out a cigarette and packed a fresh one.
She said she’d tried to sleep but every noise bolted her awake.
“I guess we’ll sleep in shifts,” she said.