A Chandler woman became a victim of home invasion, and now lives to tell others of her horrifying ordeal. Rebecca Bryant is living in fear. “I was just praying, praying, praying,” Bryant remembered.

Over the summer, she was attacked during a violent home invasion. “Fridays are still hard for me because it happened on a Friday,” Bryant explained. For an agonizing hour and a half, Bryant laid bound, bloodied and blind-folded as her attacker, Anthony Lawrence Rodriguez, ransacked her Chandler home.

 

“And I was suffocating,” Bryant recalled fearfully. “I managed to move my broken nose. That’s when I switched gears and went into the fighting mode.”

 

Fighting is something she knows all too well as a breast cancer survivor. To survive this attack she waited patiently for Rodriguez to back out of her driveway in her car, then crawled to the phone to call 911.

It’s something she wished she had done days before when she spotted Rodriguez wandering her neighborhood.

“I had taken his picture a couple of times with my camera,” Bryant said angrily. “But unfortunately he still had his ideas in his mind [of] what he was going to do.”

Bryant’s told the 911 dispatcher her car was outfitted with a LoJack tracking device, which helped Chandler police find and arrest Rodriguez less than one mile from Bryant’s home. Rodriguez is currently serving a 9-year prison sentence as part of a plea deal for a crime he had committed six other times, according to police reports.

Five months after the attack, Bryant is getting help coping thanks to the love she has for an abused standard poodle she rescued. “She’s my angel,” said Bryant. “All the other angels were busy and so they sent me Princess Grace.” With the help of Princess Grace, Bryant takes one day, one hour at a time.

 

“I’m trying to cope and I’m trying to move on with my life, but it’s going to be difficult.”