Police Responding To 'Intruder' Call Bust Down Door -- To Find Robot Vacuum As Culprit

NATOMAS, Calif. (KOVR-TV) - An unusual "intruder" led to a scary night for a California woman and left her with a busted front door -- and clean floors too.

Yana Sydnor just spent hundreds of dollars to fix her front door after police busted it open while trying to catch the supposed home intruder.

"Say about 1 a.m., I hear over my meditation music, 'Boom, boom, boom,' " she told CBS station KOVR-TV in Sacramento.

Sydnor was sleeping with her 2-year-old daughter when she heard noises coming from her stairs, so she texted her friends. "I was like, 'Hey, someone is in my house,' and they were like, 'Call the police.' I was like, 'Oh yeah, yeah, call the police,' " she said.

Sydnor said her first thought was to get out of the house. She recalled that she was so scared, she hid in her bathroom whispering to 911 while planning her escape with her baby.

"So I like put her in the tub, I get the ladder and I'm like, 'No, no, stop, stop, calm, you are okay.' I was going to go out the window," she said.

Fearing for her life, Sydnor was not about to take any chances. "I'm on the phone with the dispatcher and he is like, 'Ma'am, what do you hear?' I'm like, 'I hear someone walking down my stairs, so it's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,' " she said.

Within minutes, she heard another boom, but this time from responding officers forcing their way into her home trying to catch the intruder. "You hear police, police and then a shuffle, and then you hear laughter," she said.

Turns out the so-called robber was her robot vacuum.

"My son turned on the vacuum cleaner because he didn't want to do chores before he left for the weekend. We hadn't used this vacuum in almost two years. It went down the stairs," she explained.

She said her son set a timer on the vacuum and she had no idea. The cleaning culprit cost her a new door and a whole lot of drama for some now very clean floors. Thankfully, Sydnor now laughs about what happened that night, but she was certainly scared at the time thinking it was an actual robber.