A soft-spoken 79-year-old Alabama man who has been the target of burglaries more than a dozen times in recent years regrets that he killed a teen-aged home invader yesterday, but doesn’t sound like he’ll be losing a great degree of sleep over it, either.

For 21 years, John Croft lived in his Center Point virtually problem free until last summer.

“I’ve been a prisoner in my house,” he said.

Croft, who is 79, says the burglaries began last June. Since then, he says his house has been broken into 13 times.

The most recent case came around 1:15 Wednesday morning

“When I heard the noise, that’s when they opened the window from the basement coming to the level where the bedrooms are,” he recalled.

Jefferson County deputies say there were two men inside. Another, driving the getaway car, waited outside.

“I have three bedrooms. I think they checked the other two bedrooms out and then he came over there and said, ‘Don’t move!’ He heard the bed squeak. I was getting my gun. He said, ‘Don’t move’ and he used the ‘N’ word and I shot,” Croft recounted later Wednesday.

“I hate that boy dead, but I don’t hate I shot him.”

Croft was wounded in the ankle when the burglar shot back, but the wound is not serious. He also seems to think he knows who the other two suspects in the home invasion may be, and has relayed that information to police.

Authorities have already deemed this a case of justified self defense by Mr. Croft.