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Children call 911, hide in closet after man bursts into home armed with knife

SHARON, Mass. — A man accused of breaking into a home with three children inside and assaulting a woman was arrested late Thursday by Sharon Police.

Police said they received 911 calls about a man with a knife who had broken into the house on Billings Street around 11:25 Thursday night and assaulted someone. Some of the children made the calls, police said.

“Hearing the noise and the commotion in the house and hearing the children screaming," Richard Derry of the Sharon Police Department said.

An officer responded to the house and found the suspect, Ricardo Francis, "enraged" in the upstairs bedroom and subdued him at gunpoint, according to a news release.

“Everything is going through my mind just to neutralize this and get him on the ground and not have to shoot him," Derry said as he described what was going through his head during the response.

The children were locked inside a closet with their father while Francis stabbed the door with a knife. Investigators say he smashed a picture frame over the mother's head and chased her three children upstairs, armed with a knife.

"“He took a frame, a glass frame, and drove it into her skull," Sharon Deputy Police Chief Don Brewer said. "Hit her over the head.”

Police said the woman was assaulted and sustained non-life-threatening injuries. The children were not harmed.

Police said the suspect's only connection to the house was that he crashed into a vehicle that was at the end of the house's driveway.

Court psychiatrists told the judge Francis claims he has no memory of the alleged attack.

Francis, of Hyde Park, is being charged with armed home invasion and multiple felonies and is expected being held at Bridgewater State without bail while he undergoes a mental health evaluation.

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Police say they're impressed with how the family, especially the children, responded.

"How brave they were and how really extremely calm," Brewer said.