When two masked would-be robbers armed with a baseball bat and a piece of lumber entered a Date Street residence early Saturday morning, Mike Werdien and six friends felt a bit confused.
"Someone said, ‘Is this a joke?’" said Werdien, 23, who helped subdue the intruders. "At the end, when we were holding them down, they were like, ‘Just let us go. We got the wrong house.’"
Werdien, who lives in a second-floor, two-bedroom unit in a house at the end of an alley on Date Street said the pair hid their faces with bandanas and armed themselves with an aluminum bat and a two-by-four.
Police said a man, 35, and a woman, 25, entered the home about 1 a.m. Saturday and demanded property. Seven people inside — five men and two women, ages 23 to 30 — detained the pair until police arrived. Officers arrested the duo for investigation of first-degree robbery and kidnapping.
The woman, who has a Kaimuki address, has a conviction for driving without a license and a simple trespass violation, according to the Hawaii Criminal Justice Data Center.
The man, who does not have a local address, has three convictions for operating a vehicle under the influence of an intoxicant, harassment and unauthorized entry into a motor vehicle.
Werdien said the pair told the group to get on the floor and hand over phones and wallets. "At that point, I just basically started screaming," he said.
His yelling apparently caught the intruders by surprise.
"They didn’t really know what to do," Werdien said. "We pushed them and jumped on their backs."
Three men held the man down, and the woman was confined to one spot in the residence, he said.
Standing outside of the residence on Saturday afternoon, Werdien, who has lived at the house for about four years, said his friends had never seen the pair before. "We were kind of dumbfounded," he said.
