Prowler on the loose

Two incidents of a man entering female residences at night and watching the residents have occurred in just over a week, Capt. Eric Collins of the Logan City Police Department said, prompting a warning to female residents to close their blinds and lock their doors at night.

Collins said the police are in search of a man who entered separate female residences in the general area surrounding Adams Elementary School from 3 to 4 a.m. Collins said the first incident occurred about a week ago and the second incident about four or five days ago. In both instances, the man entered unlocked residences and went to “bedrooms where females have been sleeping and basically stood there and watched; when the female wakes up he leaves,” Collins said.

The police do not have much to go off of in looking for the man as witnesses describe him as being a man of average build wearing darker clothing, Collins said. The race and approximate age of the man is unknown, Collins said.

“It’s kind of disturbing. Certainly it’s alarming,” Collins said. “We want to get the word out for people to lock doors. We don’t know if he’s going to graduate to something more serious. Right now he’s entering and watching girls that are sleeping. We don’t want to create mass hysteria or anything, but we do want to get the word out and have some precautions.”

One of the females spied on was a USU senior majoring in psychology who said she preferred to remain unnamed while the police are attempting to catch the man.

This student said for some reason she woke up at 3:30 a.m. and saw a man “hunched up on (the) floor.” She said after she saw him he started crawling.

“I just kind of glanced at him and he was kind of hunched over,” the female student who was being watched said. “He was going through my laundry basket. He had one of my lotion bottles and he put it on our kitchen stove as he was leaving.”

She said when she saw him she asked what he was doing, but he didn’t respond. She said she then told him to turn on the light so she could see who he was. At this point the man said, “Come over here” and she told him no, she said. He then left the bedroom and exited the house through the back door.

“I don’t know if he got scared,” the student said in regards to why the man left. “I sat up further in my bed at that point. I’m not sure. Maybe he didn’t expect me to say no.”

The student said at first she thought the man “was a friend of one of my roommates and was trying to play a prank,” but from the strange way he acted and the way he spoke, she knew the man wasn’t anybody she knew. She said she couldn’t see the man very well because it was dark but described him as having hair a little lower than his ears and a voice that was definitely not an old man’s voice.

“He wasn’t threatening. He didn’t seem scared at all,” she said. “He didn’t come near me or try to approach me.”

The student said she and her roommates usually lock the door to the house, but for some reason that night they left the door unlocked and the man was able to enter. She said she wasn’t exactly sure how he entered the house but he knew it well enough to know where the back door was to leave.

The blinds in the student’s house were typically open so the man probably knew it was a house with female residents because he could see in, the student said.

“I think that he could have been possibly spying on us,” she said. “Like I say, we don’t close our blinds and we have a lot of windows in our house. It was almost like he knew there was a girl living in my room. He didn’t go around the house searching; he went straight to my laundry searching for something.”

She also said a neighbor later saw a ladder perched against the bathroom window of the female student’s house but wasn’t sure if that was how the man got in or if it was even related, although she did say it was a little strange.

“He had to have known girls lived in the house I lived in,” the resident said. “People need to know to lock their doors and close their blinds, especially if they are girls.”

Collins said he suspects the man is targeting females and likely knows females live at the residences he entered because of blinds being left open. He said females can avoid this problem by closing the blinds at night.

“If you see anything suspicious, make sure (you) call 911 immediately,” Collins said. “We want to get this guy caught as soon as possible.”

-sethhawkins@cc.usu.edu