An Oklahoma family is extending their gratitude to a quick-thinking neighbor who fatally shot a father who was attempting to drown his 3-month-old twins in a bathtub Friday.
“He saved me and my babies’ lives, and there will not be a day that will go by that I won’t thank him for that,” Michelle Sorrells, the twins’ mother, told KXII.
According to Sorrells, the babies’ father apparently just snapped when the incident occurred.
“I guess the thought of not having me or his children in his life for a while made him snap,” she said.
Sorrells said that Leland Foster, 27, forced himself into her stepfather’s home after they got into an argument Friday afternoon, and that things quickly went from sour to terrifying.
“I’m being plowed into and I go flying a couple of feet into the house, and he charges past me and goes to my children laying in the Pack ’n Play,” she said.
Sorrells said that Foster tried to drown the twins—a boy and a girl—in the bathtub. When Sorrells attempted to fight back, Foster hit and choked her several times.
“I remember thinking, ‘I’ve got to keep hitting him ... to keep him ... I’ve got to get back to the babies because he turned them facedown in the water again and they’re going to drown,’” she said.
That was when Sorrells’ 12-year-old niece ran out to get help, running into the neighbor, Cash Freeman.
Freeman grabbed his revolver, entered the home and saw Foster trying to kill the babies and then shot him twice in the back, according to police.
“I hear two pops really loud,” Sorrells said. “It made my ears ring, and Leland grunts ‘Oh!’”
“If he hadn’t done it, just plain and simple, we’d be planning four funerals,” Jeremy Burris, the twins’ step-grandfather, told the news station.
“I don’t wish this on anybody,” Burris added. “Nobody should have to go through this at all. I’m just glad that my granddaughter was able to get help and our guardian angel was our neighbor.”
Police say they have no plans to press charges against Freeman.
Read more at KXII.