Dad avoids death when a stray bullet narrowly misses his head in his room

A man was left shaken after a gun was fired into his family home, only to be stopped by an Ikea bookshelf.

Daniel, 41, has lived in the same house in Santa Ana, California, for seven years, but a recent shooting at 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 just wanted to protect my family,” he said Newsweek.

“But after the police came and everything was sorted out, my mind started to wander into a dark place, imagining if I had been hit and my wife had found me the next morning – or worse, my wife or my daughter would have done it.”

Newsweek has reached out to Santa Ana police for comment.

Daniel, the owner of startup Saturday Morning Cards, took to his TikTok page @the.great.curator in October and showed off a bullet hole in his window and mirror, a nick in his closet and damage to a bookshelf.

But the bookshelf prevented the bullet from piercing the nearest wall where his family slept.

He said in the clip, which also shows shattered glass on the floor: “Last night a stray bullet came through my upstairs window and missed my head by just a few feet.”

He added: “Thank God and my Ikea bookshelf no one was hurt last night.”

Daniel told Newsweek He was in his study late one night when “I heard a loud bang followed by shattering glass.” At first he thought, “Someone might have thrown a rock through my window,” but when he investigated, he saw the bullet hole go right through his mirror.

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

He dropped to the floor for shelter and crawled over broken glass into the room where his wife and four-year-old daughter were sleeping. He feared the bullet “might have gone through the wall and injured her.”

When he found her safe, he took her to the ground because “at that point I didn’t know if someone was trying to kill me, if it was a person driving by, or if someone was 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 not to have been injured and that the bullet was related to a stray bullet from an “isolated incident two blocks away.”

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

“I made the social media post to help me cope with the traumatic event because if I couldn’t talk about it, I would be very worried about it.”

Daniel’s video received a huge response online and was viewed over 800,000 times. One user wrote: “Time to move.”

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

Sharing his own frightening story, one user wrote: “A walker came through the wall and into the mattress I was laying on.”

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

Daniel told Newsweek: “I just feel very, very lucky, and an event like this makes it clear to me that life is precious and anything can happen at any time. And that the Ikea bookshelf saved my family’s life.”