‘We could hear him in the house:’ Saskatoon police capture suspect inside family home attic

A 31-year-old man is facing charges after he was found in the attic of a home in Saskatoon’s Varsity View neighbourhood early Sunday morning. The man made a hole in the roof of the home and crawled inside.

It was early Sunday morning, just after 1 a.m., when Karen Hardy called Saskatoon Police officers for the second time to complain that a man was trying to get into their family home.

Karen was putting one of her two children to bed late Saturday night and fell asleep. A short time later, her husband Matthew woke her up to tell her that someone had tried entering the home through some sliding glass doors.

“He told the man, ‘No, you can’t come in, you have to go away.'”

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The couple believed the man had left their property after running around the yard for a short period of time. A call was made to Saskatoon Police to inform them of what happened. But it wasn’t long before they heard sounds somewhere else.

“We heard him up on the roof… so the police came by. They had their cruisers and their spotlights, and they checked out the roof, and they couldn’t see him anywhere. So we thought, ‘O.K. that’s that,'” she recalled.

A hole was made by a break and enter suspect on the roof of Karen and Matthew Hardy’s home. (Karen Hardy/Submitted)

But the man was still there. As the couple settled in to watch a movie together around 1 a.m., they began to hear banging noises on the roof of their home.

“The pictures on the walls were shaking. It was a huge noise. We knew it was him trying to get in,” Karen said.

Police were called a second time, and by that time, the noises in the home had changed.

“We could actually hear him in the house, like crawling around in the ceiling of the house. And that’s when I got a little bit scared ’cause I thought it would be pretty easy for him to break in through the ceiling and get into the house,” she said.

While the couple said they weren’t too worried about him trying to hurt them or take anything, their two children were asleep, and the man was unpredictable.

As Matthew tried to get the man to get out of the attic, officers found that a hole had been made in the roof. They suggested Karen wake the children up and take them for a drive as officers worked to get the man out of their home.

Matthew said police were able to deploy a small, special drone into the attic, which he described as “really a crawl space,” and eventually located the man.

“He was kind of lying underneath the insulation, and he kind of nested himself in the insulation. Eventually, they got him somehow to crawl close enough to the (ceiling) door where they could grab him and drag him down,” he described.

Hardy said the man appeared “out of it,” but asked that officers not forget his shirt.

“One of the cops said to him, ‘you’ve got bigger problems than a lost t-shirt,’ and they escorted him out of the house,” Matthew said.

The home’s roof has since been repaired, and the couple said their children weren’t traumatized.

“They slept through the whole thing. They slept through the police and all the banging!” Karen said, adding that during the drive, she explained what had happened.

According to Saskatoon police, the man is facing charges of break and enter and mischief.