A man was left shaken after a gun was fired in his family home, only to be arrested by an Ikea bookcase.

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

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

“But once the police arrived and everything was sorted out, my mind started to drift into a dark place, where I imagined that if I had been hit and my wife would have found me in the morning, or worse, my wife or my daughter would have been affected.”

News week has contacted the Santa Ana Police Department for comment.

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

But the library stopped the bullet from passing through the nearby wall, where his family was sleeping.

He said in the clipwhich also shows broken glass on 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 bookshelf that no one was hurt last night.”

Daniel said News week he was in his office late at night when “I heard a loud noise followed by a shattering of glass.” He first thought, “Maybe someone threw a rock at my window,” but when he investigated, he saw the impact of the bullet go through his mirror.

“I knew right away that someone had shot at my house.”

Dropping to the ground to hide, he crawled over broken windows to the room where his wife and 4-year-old daughter were sleeping, terrified that the bullet might have gone through the wall and injured them. “.

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

Daniel grabbed his own gun, turned off the lights and called 911. When Santa Ana city police arrived nearly 20 minutes later, they told him he was lucky he didn’t have was injured and the bullet was linked to a lost ball of a “separate incident two blocks away.”

“It’s very scary to think about what could have happened,” Daniel said. News week.

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

Daniel’s video sparked a huge response online, being viewed over 800,000 times. One user wrote: “It’s time to move.”

“The three most important things in real estate are location, location, location,” said one TikTok user, while another praised “IKEA bulletproof furniture” .

One user shared their own scary story, writing: “A stray animal came through the wall and into the mattress I was lying on. »

California has a relatively small 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 said News week: “I feel very lucky, and an event like this really puts into perspective that life is precious and anything can happen at any time. And this Ikea bookcase saved my family’s life.”