MIDDLETOWN, Ohio -- When Amber Jenkins heard something early Wednesday morning, she decided to get out of bed and check it out.
A man was in the back yard, she said, so she went to the rear laundry room to find out why he was there.
She told police she peered through back door with a cellphone light; then, the man stuck his face in the window.
"His face was, like, right at the glass," Jenkins said. "I don't know if he had been out in the rain, or if he was real sweaty, but he was real wet, and his eyes were crazy. He looked like -- something. He looked like a demon."
Jenkins asked him who he was.
"He said that his name was Cornbread," she recalled. "I said, 'I don’t know any Cornbread,' and he said, 'Well, you're going to know who Cornbread is.'"
At that point, Jenkins said she ran to lock the door between the laundry room and the rest of the house, and she huddled with her daughters as she called police.
"I was in my bedroom with all three of our daughters, and all I heard was 'thud, thud, thud,' over and over and over again," she said. "The only thing I could think was that he was throwing his whole body into the door trying to get through."
Middletown officers said they found the man, later identified as Joshua Lee Wilson, sitting on the home's back step.
"He was sweating profusely stating that he was just there to see his daughter," the officers wrote in their report. And, they said, he kept looking at the back door, telling them his daughter was inside, sometimes acting as though he was talking to her.
Wilson had ripped the screen out of a storm door and broken a window to get into the laundry room, according to the police report. And he was trying to get into Jenkins' home, they said.
She thinks that was the loud "thud" she heard.
"All I could think was, if he made it past that door into our kitchen, he was obviously going to look for us," she said.
Wilson was charged with aggravated burglary and criminal damaging and booked into the Middletown City Jail.
Amber's fiance, Adam Gardner, said he's upset he was at work at the time. And, like Jenkins, he said he wonders what might have happened if the man got inside.
"What does it take somebody in their head, like, that they can just enter somebody's house and do something like that, you know? It kills me that I wasn't here."
