A scary moment. Erin Napier opened up about a strange incident that took place last year when a stranger came to town and set his sights on her then 3-year-old daughter Helen.
“May the 4th be with you,” the HGTV personality, 36, wrote via Instagram on Wednesday, May 4, alongside a photo of her daughters’ toys. “Not my favorite day.”
The Home Town star, who shares Helen, now 4, and Mae, 11 months, with husband Ben Napier, then detailed a weird encounter her family had in May 2021 while in their hometown of Laurel, Mississippi.
“We were filming the reveal for [a Home Town] episode and CBS Sunday Morning when Ben started getting messages from lots of folks in town about a 54-year-old California man dressed like a Star Wars storm trooper, wearing an ankle monitor bracelet, who had come to town and was saying some very strange things,” she recalled.
Erin elaborated on some of the haunting things the man said. “God sent me here to protect the women of Laurel, specifically little Helen,” she remembered him saying, referring to the couple’s eldest child.
“He had bought a house a block from ours and was living in it with nothing but a suitcase and these toys for when my 3-year-old daughter ‘comes over to visit,’” Erin explained.
The designer noted that her 38-year-old husband “saw red, his blood boiled” when he heard about the man. Erin, for her part, was nine and a half months pregnant with their second child and was equally as concerned.
“I was terrified,” she continued, revealing that the man was in town for about two weeks before he was “finally sent back” to California. During that time, Erin said he approached her best friend Mallorie Rasberry’s daughter “on walks with her nanny and said unsettling things. Disgusting things.”
As a result of the threat, Erin and her entire Home Town team (which Rasberry is a part of) employed 24-hour security officers both at home and at work.
“Helen asked who [the guards] were and why they were here, and we never told her the truth,” she said, remembering they told Helen, “They work with us! They’re friends of ours who are staying with us for a little while!”
The Make Something Good Today coauthor revealed that she still thinks about the scary incident “every day” even one year after everything went down.
“But it doesn’t scare me anymore,” Erin noted. “I’m thankful for the way our neighborhood guarded us and put up a hedge of protection when we needed it and it further validated what I already knew: protect your kids in the online world much as you can.”
