Nicholas Kristof surprised his readers on social media Saturday by announcing on Twitter, “I interrupted an intruder in my hotel room in Philadelphia. A chase. A fight. Restrained him. Police have just arrived.”
Kristof clarified moments later that that it was not just his room in the Franklin Hotel but rather “our hotel room” and the intruder was “just a thief” who had “been arrested.” Kristof let on that he had a “wrenched thumb from the fight” but was in good working order otherwise.
Big excitement. I interrupted an intruder in my hotel room in Philadelphia. A chase. A fight. Restrained him. Police have just arrived.
— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) November 12, 2016
Later in the day, Kristof gave a fuller account of the story on his New York Times blog. He and his wife and co-author Sheryl WuDunn were in Philadelphia for a professional society meeting. He had slipped out while she was sleeping to get coffee and had handled the door gingerly so as not to wake her. Because of this, the door had closed but not locked.
At the elevator, Kristof met a man who looked like he also would be going down, “but he said that he was waiting for his wife and I should go ahead.” When Kristof came back to his room, coffee in hand, he found the same man standing there, holding his sleeping wife’s purse and going through it.
“What are you doing? Who are you?” Kristof shouted.
He threatened the man with hot coffee if he didn’t answer. The intruder tried to claim he was the maintenance man. The columnist’s waking wife found the whole scene very confusing, but had the presence of mind to call hotel security.
At that point, the man bolted past Kristof, who gave chase. Kristof gave the intruder a bit of a lead when he threatened to cut Kristof with a hypothetical knife. The two ended up racing down the stairs and crashing through the hotel restaurant.
Finally, when they got near the front door, “with other people nearby and not wanting him to escape out the lobby, I jump him. There’s a tussle and I pin him in a full nelson,” Kristof wrote.
He reminded readers parenthetically, “This is less heroic than it sounds, because he’s scrawny; I only tackle thieves who are smaller than me.”
Nor was Kristof in any deadly peril. After the police took the man away and took Kristof’s statement, he learned that the man “turn[ed] out to be homeless and unarmed.”
The columnist found himself grateful that the would-be thief had no weapon and had one all important takeaway message for his readers: “always, always, always lock your hotel room door even if you’re only going to be gone for a couple of minutes.”
