Dad Cheats Death as Stray Bullet Narrowly Misses His Head While in His Room

A man has been left shaken after a gun was shot into his family home, only to be stopped by an Ikea bookcase.

Daniel, 41, has lived in the same home in Santa Ana, California, for seven years, but a recent shooting into his home has forced him to consider a move for himself and his young family.

“When it happened, I wasn’t in shock; I was more in emergency mode, and I just wanted to protect my family,” he told Newsweek.

“But after the police came and everything was settled, my mind started to go to a dark place, where I imagined if I would have been hit and my wife would have found me in the morning—or worse, my wife or daughter would have been hit.”

Newsweek reached out to the Santa Ana Police Department for comment.

Daniel, the owner of the start-up Saturday Morning Cards, took to his TikTok page @the.great.curator in October to show a bullet hole through his window and mirror, a nick in the cupboard, and damage to a bookcase.

But the bookcase prevented the bullet from going through the next wall, where his family was sleeping.

He said in the clip, which also shows shattered glass across the floor: “Last night, a stray bullet went through my upstairs window, narrowly missing my head by a few feet.”

He added: “Thank God, and my Ikea bookcase, that nobody was hurt last night.”

Daniel told Newsweek he was in his study late at night when “I heard a loud pop followed by glass shattering.” He initially thought, “Someone might have thrown a rock into my window,” but when he investigated, he saw the bullet hole going straight through his mirror.

“I immediately knew someone had shot into my house.”

Dropping to the ground for cover, he crawled over broken glass to the room where his wife and 4-year-old daughter were sleeping, terrified that the bullet could have gone “through the wall and may have hurt them.”

Finding them safe, he brought them to the ground with him, as “at that point, I didn’t know if someone was trying to kill me or if it was a drive-by or if someone was breaking into my house.”

Daniel grabbed his own gun, switched off the lights and called 911. When the City of Santa Ana Police Department arrived almost 20 minutes later, they told him he was lucky not to have been hurt, and the bullet was related to a stray bullet from a “separate incident two blocks away.”

“It’s very scary to think what could have happened,” Daniel told Newsweek.

“I made the social media post to help me deal with the traumatic event because if I couldn’t talk about it, I think I’d feel a lot of anxiety over this.”

Daniel’s video had a huge reaction online, being viewed over 800,000 times. One user wrote: “Time to move.”

“Three most important things in real estate are location, location, location,” a TikTok user said, while another praised the “IKEA Bulletproof Furniture.”

One user shared their own frightening story, writing: “I had a stray come through the wall and into the mattress I was laying on.”

California has a relatively low number of gun deaths per capita in the United States. Data from Statista showed that, in 2024, the number of gun deaths per 100,000 residents was 8.7 in the state. Rhode Island was the lowest, at 3.1, while Mississippi was the highest, at 29.7.

Daniel told Newsweek: “I just feel very very lucky, and an event like this really puts things into perspective for me that life is precious and anything can happen at any time. And that Ikea bookcase saved my family’s life.”