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Everywhere you look, there’s Wordle, the popular online game where players try to guess a five-letter word.
Thank goodness, though, because it pretty much saved the life of an 80-year-old woman being held hostage by an unhinged intruder.
The elder lady was rescued from a hostage situation in her own home in Chicago due in large part to her failure to complete the game’s daily challenge on February 5.
Denyse Holt was reportedly sleeping in her bed when a naked man broke into her home in the wee hours of the night armed with a pair of scissors.
At the time, the man, later identified as 32-year-old James H. Davis III, asked Holt to remain calm as he got into bed with her and assured her he would not touch her.
At some point, Davis asked Holt to get into the bathtub with him (thankfully, fully clothed) before dragging her to the basement bathroom where he barricaded them inside with a chair for roughly 17 hours, Complex reported.
Obviously, she had no way of playing Wordle or sharing her results with her daughters like she does every single day, without fail.
The lack of an update made her daughter’s spidery senses tingle:
“I didn’t send my older daughter a Wordle in the morning. And that was disconcerting to her,” Holt said.
Her daughter, Meredith Holt-Caldwell, who lives across the country in Seattle, noticed this as well and got a family friend to call the police.
Denyse is in the middle, surrounded by daughters Jennifer Holt (left) and Meredith Holt-Caldwell (right):
Besides Wordle, it was also Holt’s ability to remain calm during the crisis that may have saved her life.
The Chicago Tribune has more from the scene:
At one point, Holt even assured her captor, “You’re the captain. I’m on your team.”
“She’s amazing,” Holt-Caldwell said. “She doesn’t really know how she was able to remain that calm. She just kind of played along and made him feel as though he was in charge.”
When the man threatened her, Holt, a former middle school teacher, told him it scared her, which prompted him to throw away the scissors and declare he wouldn’t hurt her.
She was rescued by police, and Davis was put in custody in Cook County Jail. It’s believed he was going through a mental health crisis
Ultimately, Holt-Caldwell just wants this to be a message to reach out to your loved ones when they’re far away.
Whether that’s via Wordle or not is completely up to you.
[sources:complex&chicagotribune]
