A would-be burglar met his match when he tried to elude Margo Foster, a marathon runner with a black belt in karate who also knows kickboxing and kung fu, police said.On Friday morning, the 53-year-old Lighthouse Point resident returned home from tennis practice to find an intruder rummaging through her bedroom.
Without thinking twice, she said in an interview, she bolted through the living and dining rooms and followed the startled man out to the backyard. Police said he had one of Foster’s backpacks strapped on his shoulders, filled with her property. She wanted it back.
A seven-block-long chase had just begun. Lighthouse Point police corroborated Foster’s version of events, and without endorsing her gutsy conduct, said she had evidently been up to the challenge.
As related by Foster, the intruder began to climb the 6-foot-high wooden fence in the yard, when she “grabbed him by the neck, ripped him off the fence.. threw him to the ground, and put my knee to his chest.”
The two struggled for a few minutes, Foster in her white tennis skirt, before the burglar dropped the bag and started running again.
“Go ahead and run,” the former yacht detailer said she yelled. “You’re not going to get away from me. I’ve been running for 40 years.”
“I outran the kid,” said Foster. “He had no cardiovascular system.”
Foster said she’d trained for years for such a situation. “I wasn’t going to sit back and let something like this happen,” she said.