Eighty-two-year-old woman beats up burglar who broke into her home

<span>Photograph: John Richards/Flickr Vision</span>
Photograph: John Richards/Flickr Vision

An 82-year-old female body builder beat up a 28-year-old man who tried to break into her home in Rochester, New York.

“I’m alone and I’m old, but guess what – I’m tough,” Willie Murphy, a regular weightlifter, told local news station WHAM.

She added: “He picked the wrong house to break into.”

Murphy said the young man banged on her door, yelling he was sick and to let him in. Murphy called emergency responders but refused to let him inside. Then, she said, he broke down the door.

She grabbed the nearest object, a metal-legged table, and “went to working on him”, she said. “Guess what – the table broke.”

Murphy said she jumped on the intruder, poured shampoo on his face and hit him with a broom. She even tried to drag him out of the house, but he was too big.

“I’m hitting him, hitting him, hitting him with the broom,” she said. By the time police and emergency workers arrived, she said, “I had really did a number on that man … I think he was happy when he went in the ambulance.”

Murphy, who works out almost every day at the local YMCA, said she can deadlift 225lb.