Good Guy with a Gun #50: Arlington, TX (Not a duplicate)

Original incident: December 21, 2023. 24 hours after GGWAG #49, a woman entered another home in Arlington, behaving very strangely. The homeowner told her to get out, but she advanced on him instead.

This is the kind of content featured in the 2026 Good Guy with a Gun one-page-per-day desk calendar.

No, I didn’t accidentally publish the same story twice.

We’re still in Arlington, Texas, but we’re about 15 minutes north-northwest of yesterday’s Vancil Drive story, right next to the UT-Arlington campus. According to neighbor Shawn Moore, “It’s a college area. The university is just right down the road. All in all, it’s a quiet neighborhood.”

It’s almost exactly 24 hours later, too — 2 AM. A family of four is asleep in their new home on Pecan Street. They had moved in just a few weeks earlier.

One of the children, a teenaged boy, woke to the sound of a woman’s voice he didn’t recognize. He came into his parents’ room and got them up.

The dad grabbed his gun while the mom dialed 911. He confronted the stranger in the kitchen.

He asked her, “What are you doing in my house?”¹

She said, “What are you doing in my house?”

He told her to get out. She told him to get out.

She started to get agitated, and when she started coming at him, he fired.

The woman had died by the time the police got there. She had no ID on her and was unknown to the family. There was also no sign of forced entry.

No charges were filed against the homeowner.

Later, the woman was identified as 34-year-old Taylor Ryanne Frankum. As with many people who are threats to others, she was dearly loved by her family. I’ll let her sister, Rhiana, tell that side of the story based on her public Facebook post:

When she was shot and killed, this situation completely leveled me. She was like a mother to me, and she wrongfully had broken into a house looking for safety for the night. She had abused drugs for many years, but greater than that she had been failed by the systems in America because she was detrimentally mentally ill. She needed help, she needed support. She was met with the lowest possible amount of support: jail time. She wanted to live and to be a better person. A better sister. She wanted a different life.

Since then I never held any ill hatred towards anyone who owns guns, or responsibly advocates for them. It is a scary world we live in and when the policing agencies have access to weapons and we don’t it doesn’t make for a reasonable government.

There’s a lot I disagree with her about in that post, but I of course completely accept her love for her sister and appreciate the common ground regarding guns generally.

I’m providing the link as evidence of what she said, not for anyone to harass her.

Sources

I appreciate the local news coverage of this story.

Every organization that I can find did a good job; most gave airtime to it; they all did extra legwork to understand more about the story. Put them all together and I think you have the best of all worlds.

WFAA gave it a web article and airtime. On-air reporter Tiffy Liu humanized the story, starting her segment by placing the viewer into the homeowner’s perspective: “Imagine waking up and finding a stranger in your house.”

That said, the subhead to their article says, “The home intruder broke every window of the home, sources told WFAA.” But Tiffy is right there at the house, and there’s video that shows the windows, and the ones we can see are all intact. There’s also no reference to broken windows in any of the other local news sources — it only appears in write-ups that are based on WFAA reporting.

If the story were written by AI, I’d suggest that it’s a hallucination, but the story doesn’t have that sort of a feel. Regardless, I think it’s an error.

NBCDFW’s coverage is very good, too, but for another reason: They get the local reactions so we can see what the neighborhood is like.

Finally, Fox 4 KDFW spoke to Police Sergeant Courtney White, who spoke effectively about the nature of Frankum’s interactions with the homeowner.

Between the three, you get almost perfect coverage for a story like this — with the exception of that weird “broken glass” bit. All of them show what a news organization can do to go beyond the police report.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram coverage is behind a paywall; however, I appreciate the fact that they’re the only source I found that gave Frankum’s name. You can hear it without paying if you click “Listen to this article”. They also published a piece focused on Frankum, which is behind a paywall and which I haven’t listened to.

Hoodline did some wrap-up coverage, but they repeated the “broken glass” claim.

Finally, Carlos Garcia at Blaze Media also did a wrap-up, also repeating the “broken glass” claim.

That thing that never happens, happens every day.

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1. I put quotes around the man’s “What are you doing in my house?” to give the right effect. We don’t know the precise words that were said.