A self-employed HVAC technician in Indianapolis, Indiana, narrowly avoided being shot last year while running from a woman with a pistol who demanded he fix her clothes dryer for free.
The incident grabbed renewed attention recently when the suspect was reportedly rearrested on a charge of violating the terms of her pretrial release. She’s scheduled for a Monday, Nov. 24, pretrial conference in Marion County Superior Court.
Technician Nate Baird said things didn’t seem quite right at the house on the city’s northeast side back in March of 2024, especially after the woman there said she wasn’t going to pay for a dryer repair because the appliance was under warranty.
She had phoned a referral service that led her to contact him for the repair, Baird said, and seemed to think he was from the company with which she had a warranty. “I explained to her that I was a different company,” Baird recalled on Tuesday.
Baird said he diagnosed the dryer problem as a bad thermal fuse and told her it could be fixed for $120, which he called a good price. She refused to pay, he said. “The way she was acting … she didn’t want to pay anything,” Baird said.
When he started preparing to leave, Baird said, the woman told him to put the dryer back together. He’d be happy to, Baird said he replied, for a $70 diagnostic fee. She again refused to pay, he said, and he headed for the front door.
“I went to leave and she blocked the door, and I looked down” to see the woman holding a pistol, Baird said. The woman said, “ ‘You’re going to fix my (expletive) dryer right now or I’m going to kill you,’ ” Baird said.
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Baird returned to the dryer.
“I said I would look at the dryer. There was a door right next to where the dryer was,” he said. He bolted through the back door, then heard a shot.
“I think she was firing at me,” he said. “I heard the bullet whizzing right by.”
Baird said he went to a local police station and filed a report. Police later arrested Reba L. Wilson, now 44, and media reports say they found a shell casing on the dryer and a pistol under a couch. Wilson remained in the Marion County Jail on Wednesday after her October 22 rearrest.
Wilson is charged with intimidation, pointing a firearm at another person, criminal confinement of another person, criminal recklessness, and unlawful possession of a firearm by a serious violent felon. Her attorney, Lucy Frick, of the Marion County Public Defender Agency, declined to comment on the specifics of the case.
Frick said she needs to obtain a deposition from Baird, and that she anticipates the case going to trial next year.
Baird is a U.S. Navy veteran who worked as a jet mechanic while in the service. Most of his work is appliance repair, he said, but he does do some heating and air conditioning repair and has a number of regular clients, for HVAC work, who own rental properties.
Baird said the incident has left he and his wife wary, even though he’d never previously so much as argued with a customer. “It does bother me,” he said. “It agitates me and makes me worry a little bit.”
He added that he’s willing to testify at a trial. “If I need to testify, I’d be more than happy to do it,” he said.
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