These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is significantly updated from the calendar version.
Have you ordered your 2027 Good Guy with a Gun calendar yet?
This feels like a TV show with a weird twist, but it’s real life. I can only imagine how the elderly couple felt when they found out who their attacker was.
The man wore a ski mask and forced his way into the couple’s home just after 7 in the evening. He knocked the 85-year-old woman to the ground and tried to strangle her with a zip tie.
Her husband, also 85, tried to stop him. The intruder turned on him, too, getting his hands around the old man’s neck, and then chased him into a bedroom.
More than once, the husband told him to stop. When that didn’t work, he fired his revolver and hit the intruder in the leg.
The intruder ran. Well, left, anyway — I’m not sure how easy it was to run with a bullet hole in your leg.
Police found him a short time later in his own home nearby, hiding under a bed.
He was 42-year-old Benjamin Sungjin (a.k.a. Benjamin Uhrmacher), and he was no stranger — he’d been the couple’s neighbor for years. He was upset, it turned out, because they couldn’t give him a ride to work.
A ride to work? Most people would’ve called a cab. (Maybe not Uber or Lyft, though, because they don’t let their drivers carry firearms.)
The couple’s injuries were significant but not life-threatening. The wife’s hip was broken, and she needed multiple surgeries, a hospital stay, rehab, and ongoing physical therapy.
Police said early on that the husband likely wouldn’t be charged, and when prosecutors wrote up the case, they said he “fired his revolver in self-defense.”
Sungjin was arrested and charged with home invasion and first- and second-degree assault.
After the calendar went to print, we found two updates to the case:
On January 8, 2026, Sungjin pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree murder and second-degree assault — what prosecutors called “a violent home invasion attack against his elderly neighbors in Columbia.”
On May 6, 2026, Sungjin was sentenced to life with all but 60 years suspended: 50 to serve on the attempted murder, and 10 more, consecutive, on the assault. After that come five years of supervised probation, mental health and substance use treatment, restitution, and orders to stay away from the couple and their house.
I keep circling around the idea: All this because they couldn’t drive him to work?
Sources
News
Man Shot After Breaking Into Couple’s Columbia Home, Injuring Them During Assault (Patch)
Case Updates (Howard County State’s Attorney’s Office; the plea and sentencing, in its running case-updates page)
I get that he may likely only serve part of those 60 years, but still part of the sentence he was given makes me smile -- if he only serves 20, it's highly unlikely his neighbors will still be here for restitution to be served or for him to stay away from them, and if he does serve all 60 he'll be 102 and unlikely be in any shape to do anything. But, seriously, who attacks 85-year-olds who don't want to drive them somewhere? How terrifying it must have been for them, and that poor woman -- it is hard enough to heal from broken bones when you are young; a broken hip is often a death sentence for the elderly. (My mom was gone a year after her hip broke, and she didn't have all the trauma this poor woman did.) I can't imagine having to go through all that at 74.