Man smashes hole in Saskatoon couple's roof to hide in attic

Matthew Hardy thought he'd scared off the man who tried to break into his family's house in Saskatoon on Saturday night.

The man, frantic and covered with leaves and dirt, had tried to force his way into the Varsity View house through the sliding door on the deck around midnight, Hardy said.

Hardy called police. Four officers came and searched the yard and alley for the suspect. No luck.

Hardy and his wife Karen then tried to relax with a horror-comedy movie, Death of a Unicorn.

An hour later their evening went really sideways.

"All of a sudden we hear 'boom, boom, boom' out of nowhere and the house is shaking," Hardy said. 

The man had returned, climbed on the deck railing, onto an elm tree and then onto their roof. He didn't stay there long.

"Then all of a sudden you can hear splintering and cracking. And I said, 'Karen, he's trying to get in the house,'" Hardy said.

"Then you could just hear crunch, like walking on leaves, plastic-covered leaves. He was in our ceiling, crawling across our insulation, and you could hear him, track him as as easy as anything through the house."

They called the police again. Officers got on the roof and found a hole where a vent had been torn off. They dropped a drone into the attic and found the suspect, in a corner burrowed under insulation.

Police accessed the attic through a hatch in a bedroom closet and dragged the suspect out.

"Sure enough, as he's leaving the house, he says 'Don't forget my shirt,' which was pretty funny, " Hardy said.

They found his shirt — and a sock in the roof gutter.

Police said in a news release that a 33-year-old Saskatoon man is charged with break and enter.