“Stray” bullet pierces sleeping couple’s bed

Baldrick thought that if you owned the bullet with your name on it you could avoiding getting shot.

If there’s even a shred of cunning in that plan, an Arizona couple might want to hang on to the “stray” bullet that unceremoniously jolted them from their slumber at the weekend  – and, unlike the Blackadder stooge, they probably don’t even need to carve their names into this one.

Ian Foxworthy and his partner were fast asleep at their home in Gilbert, near Phoenix, at around 1.30 a.m. on Sunday morning when a rude noise abruptly roused them.

“We woke up, switched on the light, and took a couple minutes to really piece together,” Foxworthy told ABC affiliate KNXV. “We thought maybe our ceiling fan had exploded.”

Looking around, Foxworthy was horrified to discover the real source of the sound: a bullet, along with the hole it had made in the headboard of their bed.

“Had the bullet come through the headboard another four inches either direction it would have struck one of us,” he told the television station. “Had it been down a little bit more it would have killed one of our dogs.”

Yet the true mystery is where the “stray” shot came from in the first place – and whether the couple’s miraculously close shave really was down to an accident.

There are some empty lots of land near the couple’s home, potentially leaving their property more exposed to a genuinely random bullet.

But Foxworthy is understandably troubled by not knowing where the bullet came from, who pulled the trigger, and why.

“It would be much simpler if we could point to, like, a motive or something like that,” he said. “That would give us more peace of mind than not knowing anything.”

Despite the many unanswered questions, Foxworthy appreciates that the shot, whose sound was caught on their home security camera, so very nearly did a whole lot worse.

“This is like a one in a billion instance, I feel like,” he said. “It was just a miracle, really.”

“Comes down to there are consequences, more than just property damage,” Foxworthy added. “Somebody could’ve gotten killed.”