Grandmother, 83, wins bravery award for fending off attacker with walking stick
An 83-year-old woman was caught on film fighting off a 28-year-old robber with her walking stick. She says she would do it all over again.
A feisty 83-year-old grandmother has won a bravery award after fighting off a burglar — going “hell for leather on him” with her walking stick.
Shopkeeper June Turner was caught on camera at her newsagency at Hanley, in the British city of Stoke-on-Trent, where she repeatedly hit the 28-year-old robber with a cane after breaking her hip three years earlier.
“I said, ‘You’re not having my money’,” she told Stoke-on-Trent Live. “I couldn’t find the panic button, so I got my stick and I really belted him with it.
“I went hell for leather on him,” she said, with the video eventually showing the robber running out almost empty-handed.
She said it was her “instinct” to “give him a good whack,” adding, “I think he was quite shocked, he wasn’t expecting that. I bet he thought, ‘She’s getting on a bit.’”
The grandma also insisted she would do the same thing again — “but with something heavier.”
“He won’t be so lucky next time,” she said.
Turner’s heroics last year saw her winning the Amplifon Awards for Brave Britons in the Act of Courage category this week, ITV said.
“I never thought I would get that,” she told the network.
Aaron Mountford, 28, was later sentenced to two years in prison for the caught-on-camera crime, according to Stoke-on-Trent Live.
This story originally appeared in the New York Post and has reproduced with permission.