After checking on baked potatoes cooking in the oven, Ann glanced out the kitchen window of her home on Northwest Skyline Boulevard shortly before noon on Monday. She and her husband were expecting about a dozen neighbors for a midday potluck to discuss wildfire safety in their Forest Park neighborhood.
There was someone out there, but it wasn’t a neighbor.
Instead, Ann — who asked The Oregonian/OregonLive to withhold her and her husband’s last names due to safety concerns — spotted a man she didn’t recognize carrying her husband’s ladder.
Ann, a 76-year-old artist, yelled to Marv, 85, who was upstairs working on their income taxes.
So began an hours-long ordeal that ended about 6 p.m. Monday when Portland police used explosives to blast open a door to the couple’s home, where a 33-year-old man and a 33-year-old woman had barricaded themselves for hours. Police arrested the pair on allegations of burglary, coercion and menacing. They left behind the intruders’ pitbull.
After spotting the man carrying the ladder, Ann ran out of the house through the garage and came face to face with him — the man later would be identified as Michael Anthony Mazzi — as he propped the ladder against the house, leaning it at an angle that led directly to an upstairs window.
Shocked, she asked the man, “What the hell are you doing?”
“This is my house,” he replied.
Ann and Marv, who’ve been married for 16 years and have owned their home next to a popular Forest Park trailhead for more than a decade, have been diligent about preparing for dangers such as wildfires. But in these hills west of downtown Portland, they never expected they’d face this danger: a home invasion in the middle of the day.
On Thursday, Ann and Marv recounted the bizarre encounter, with Ann at one point admitting she could feel her body tensing up as she remembered arguing with the man on Monday.
Marv, barefoot, eventually ran outside into the rain, too, to confront the man. He dialed 911 from the driveway.
Ann had retreated from the man, but she soon realized the intruder had made it inside the house, and so she rushed down the hallway and into her bedroom.
That’s where she found him, standing next to a mirrored closet in the couple’s first-floor bedroom. A woman — later identified as Kerina Ann Trabue — was crouched behind him, next to a dog that looked terrified, Ann said.
The man told Ann to leave the house or “something bad would happen.” Ann said she locked eyes with the woman and pleaded, pointing to the man. “Can’t you get him to stop?” she begged.
“I already tried,” the woman replied.
Ann decided to back off again, but she went to the kitchen to grab her cell phone first. The man followed, lunging for the phone.
In the home’s long hallway, she said, “I’ll leave if you let me have my phone.” He relented.
Marv was in the hallway now as well, having hung up with the 911 dispatcher.
“The police are on the way,” Marv said as he discreetly closed a door to a bedroom. A lifelong hunter, Marv stores firearms in the room, something he told dispatchers. He analyzed the situation – taking into account the 50-year gap in age between himself and the man screaming at his wife – and decided to leave his guns behind the closed door.
“I’ve been in fights before, but at 85, I’m not in my prime,” Marv said, three days after the ordeal.
Both Marv and Ann exited the house calmly. Outside they came upon two friends, neighbors, who were bringing chili and brownies for the potluck. They went to the neighbors’ house as police descended on theirs.
Portland police dispatched their first officers at 11:24 a.m. Within minutes a few dozen units from Portland police, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office and the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office raced to the scene.
Officers closed Northwest Skyline Boulevard from Germantown Road to Springville Road and built a command center at nearby Skyline Restaurant.
Ann and Marv would later learn the intruders barricaded themselves inside the house allegedly by locking all the doors and loosening the handles’ screws. They also disconnected the garage doors from their automatic sensors.
Dozens of police blockaded the road. They brought in a K9 unit and a robot to search the house. For several hours, Mazzi and Trabue did not respond to police as officers tried to contact the pair, police said.
Finally, the police went in. Officers used explosive devices to blow down a door in the garage and sent a robot to search the house. They found Mazzi and Trabue sleeping on the sofa bed in Ann’s art studio above the garage and arrested them. None of Ann’s landscape paintings in progress – glowing red, orange and yellow scenes depicting the Santiam Canyon fire – were damaged. None of her materials were missing.
“We were so lucky that they didn’t trash the house because they had so much time to do so,” Ann said.
Police found drug paraphernalia and a large fixed-blade butcher knife in a backpack Mazzi and Trabue left behind, court records said.
In an interview with police, Mazzi allegedly said he targeted the home because “it looked like they had nice stuff.” Trabue, refusing to answer police questions and staring at a wall, claimed she lived at the home for a year and a half, according to a probable-cause affidavit.
Mazzi, who was convicted in 2008 of a violent assault and burglary, had several active warrants out of Clackamas County. He now faces charges for felony burglary, coercion and misdemeanor menacing.
Trabue faces the same charges. It’s unclear from court records whether the two are a couple or where they live.
In the aftermath of the traumatic home invasion, Ann and Marv commend the police officers who responded. The officers were cautious and kept the homeowners informed all day, Ann said.
Ann and Marv don’t know what drew Mazzi and Trabue to their home, but they said they have empathy for people suffering from destructive drug addictions and who need a warm place to sleep. But that doesn’t make the experience any less terrifying. They’re in close contact with the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office as they prepare for Mazzi and Trabue’s arraignments.
“My concern is that they’re going to come back,” Marv said.
A friend of the couple took the intruders’ pitbull to an animal shelter Monday night.
At about 11 p.m. that night, a few hours after being allowed back into their home, Marv and Ann ate the chili that was intended for their potluck.
