During a family vacation in Ocean City, Maryland, Josie Bowers found herself in a threatening situation. Now, nineteen, Bowers said she was a fifteen-year-old when the incident occurred. She and her family were visiting Maryland for a vacation from their home in Canada when she returned to the hotel room by herself to take a shower while the rest of her family continued to enjoy some time in the sun on the beach.
Bowers, who was raised by a police officer stepfather, thought she was safe inside the Hilton hotel room by herself. She made sure to lock the door. But then something bizarre started to happen. A man inserted a device under the hotel door as he attempted to break in and get the teen girl who was all alone.
“Before I could take a shower, I heard this noise, so I went over (to the door) to figure out what it was. I found this contraption. I was just standing there in my towel, and this man opened the door.”
“Holy sh*t,” Bowers recalled thinking in her now-viral video. “I’m in a towel now, and someone is about to break in and get me.” She wasn’t able to call her family or authorities for help because she didn’t have cellphone service inside the hotel. She quickly slammed the door and used the deadbolt to keep it shut.
However, the person on the other side of the door didn’t want to give up. They continued trying to break into the Hilton hotel room to get the fifteen-year-old girl who was locked behind it on the other side. Because she was young and didn’t know what was going on, Bowers wanted to open the door a crack to see if it might be a Hilton employee on a mission to do something in the room.
Thankfully, the teen girl knew a trick that could scare intruders away. Because her stepfather was a veteran police officer, he made sure to educate Bowers with the trick so she would be a little bit safer every day – and it worked really well.
“So the door opened a crack, and I just slammed it back shut,” she said in the second video about the incident. She could hear men talking on the other side of the door. Then one man said, “Hello, miss. Services… We came to fix your door.”
She said, “I didn’t really have time to process anything. My main thought was I am in a towel, and I’m naked. Do they have weapons? If I stop them, are they going to get mad? Hurt me?”
Because she was so young and alone, she didn’t know what was going on. She decided to open the door a little bit. She immediately could tell that the man on the other side of the door was not a Hilton employee. “They were in jeans and a T-shirt.”
“My stepdad is a police officer, and he taught me never to let people know that you are alone.”
So Bowers yelled, “Hey dad, there’s somebody here to fix the door.” This worked immediately as the would-be criminals ran away.
