Homeowners Call the Police, Mistaking Roomba for Burglars

Hearing noises in the middle of the night in your home can be scary for anyone. A couple from North Carolina were spooked by bumping sounds while watching a movie in their bedroom. Thomas Milam, husband and father, believed he heard an intruder and called the police. While waiting for the authorities to arrive, he was getting ready to use his military experience to confront the burglar himself.

“As we were talking, we heard more noises downstairs and were increasingly alarmed,” Milam said on the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page. “All my military training came back to me. I started analyzing the path the intruder would take, their line of fire if they entered the room in certain ways, and where we should be to decrease our risk of getting hurt.”

After the police searched the home, they realized the noise the Milams heard were from a Roomba robotic vacuum they had purchased just two days prior. 

“Somehow it turned itself on and was vacuuming our house without us having scheduled it,” Milam wrote. “It had gotten stuck in the hallway below our stairs which is close to our room, and it kept bumping into our walls which explained the noises we kept hearing.”

The family has now named their Roomba Harry, “the sticky bandit from Home Alone“.