Two Men Pretending to Be Maintenance Workers Shot At When Trying to Break Into Home

If at first your robbery doesn't succeed, try, try again  … by badly attempting to kick down a door and getting shot at by an angry tenant.

That’s the mantra that two would-be thieves disguised as maintenance workers apparently held last weekend after they attempted to forcibly enter Ethan Rodriguez’s apartment in Dallas, Texas.

Though suspect Aaron Contreras, who was arrested on Tuesday, initially knocked on the door pretending to be a maintenance man — “Yes, they came to check your air filters,” he replied when asked what he needed — Rodriguez was suspicious of his story from the jump. 

“I told him no one was home and then I went back to playing my games," he recalled of the incident to CBS News, noting he found it strange that repairmen would stop by his home on a Saturday evening.

This hunch was ultimately proven correct when Contreras, joined by a mask-clad man emerging from the shadows, did their damndest to kick down his door in footage caught by Rodriguez’s home security camera.

“A couple minutes later, at least a couple seconds later, I heard banging on the door,” Rodriguez remembered, noting his reaction was to “grab my firearm.” "Fearing for the safety of me and my brother, I fired at the door."

Though no one was injured in the ordeal, the robbers appeared to learn a very, very important life lesson in their ill-fated endeavor — don’t mess with Texas or its gun-toting residents.