DENVER — The L'Herault family's Sunday was supposed to be spent watching their son play in a baseball tournament. Instead, it took an unexpected turn.
“I was putting away some groceries and walked down some stairs and looked out the window and noticed a man in my backyard with his hands on our bicycle,” Laura L'Herault said.
It was a feeling that was hard to describe but one Laura L'Herault was quick to react to.
“He was lifting it and sort of backing out, and I went running out as fast as I could, and I just screamed as loud and I didn't stop screaming, and he put the bike down, and then he kind of went to our back alley and I followed him out," Laura L'Herault said.
Her husband, Greg L’Herault, was mowing the front lawn when a neighbor alerted him.
“Kind of turn the corner on the front lawn, looked down and one of our neighbors was telling me to shut off the mower and 'your wife is,' you know, 'something happened here,'” Greg L’Herault said.
Alongside his neighbor, Greg L’Herault decided to track the man down, who he says even threatened to come back and harm his family.
“There's one more neighbor that we were the ones sort of confronting him or very close to him — within a few feet. So, we just sort of kept him there and a couple of neighbors called 911, and we didn't know how long we were going to have to keep him or what was going on,” he said.
But after calling 911, Greg L'Herault said police never showed.
“That would be the most frustrating part, right? It got to be probably 45, 50 minutes where I was like, 'well, we have to go to my kid’s baseball game,' so I was like, 'I’ll see you later,'” Greg L’Herault said.
Denver7 reached out to the Denver Police Department to see why an officer didn’t respond, but we did not receive a response.
“A 911 call with those types of circumstances around it seems like an important thing, but maybe it's worse somewhere else,” Greg L’Herault said.
It was a moment this family wants others to be aware of while at the same time showing how his neighborhood came together.
"It's just a shame that everything has to be locked up," Laura L'Herault said, "even when you mow the lawn on a Sunday morning."
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