Peeping Tom incident being investigated
An unknown individual was seen by Aggie Village residents peering into windows outside of apartments around 11:30 p.m. on Jan. 8.
An engineering senior who wished to remain anonymous said she and a friend were frightened twice in one night.
The student said she and her neighbor were in her apartment that night and heard a rapid knocking on the neighbor’s upstairs apartment door. When the neighbor got up to see who it was, the person was already gone.
“Through the balcony, she saw a person watching through my window,” the student said.
She said the individual was wearing a black jacket and a dark-colored beanie but could be identified as a white male.
When her friend confronted him, she said he responded in Spanish as if he knew that was the women’s native language.
“He said, ‘Hola, como estan?’ like ‘How are you?’ and then ran,” the student said. “I’m guessing he was already looking through our window before and heard us speaking Spanish, or has seen us somewhere else and knows that we speak Spanish.”
The student said she and her friend left the area to pick up a friend from Bullen Hall on campus.
While they were waiting in their car, she said they saw a dark figure who was wearing different clothing from the window peeper.
“We were parked and we saw someone right behind our car standing with his arms crossed looking to us, just staring at us,” she said. “It was weird, it was totally weird.”
She said when their male friend came outside and got in the car, the group left. The man who was “stalking” them started running after the car as if to chase them.
The student said she called the police from the car as they drove.
Later, she said, she and her friend decided to spend the night together because they were still feeling spooked.
“We were both at the bed when we suddenly heard steps through the window, but we didn’t dare to look,” the student said. “We had the blinds closed and we heard the footsteps outside, you know like footsteps in snow.”
She said they called the police again and when they arrived she explained to them what happened.
Officer Kent Harris of USU Police responded to the call. He said he and the other officer on the scene waited and searched the vicinity of Aggie Village thoroughly.
“We spent an hour just watching that particular building,” Harris said. “The only thing we could see was the footprints up to the window. We couldn’t get a pattern because the snow was so powdery and frozen, you could just tell that a shoe had made the mark.”
Harris said he and the other officers could tell there had been recent activity around the window of the apartment in question.
He said Officer Craig Johnson walked around some of the buildings in the area and noticed similar shoe prints in the snow.
“The general M.O. looks like he walks through the snow, as it is quieter than walking on the icy sidewalks, then walks up close to windows he finds of interest,” Johnson’s report states. “I continued on foot and observed footprints around most buildings up next to windows.”
Harris said he and the other graveyard shift officers make a habit of driving through Aggie Village and other campus dorms and apartment complexes.
He said whenever they respond to a call about voyeurism he cautions the tenants to be mindful of how their blinds are positioned, so nobody can see inside.
“We’ve found that if an individual has been looking in one window, they’ve been looking in others as well,” Harris said. “When I was with Logan City Police, I was with them for 21 years, and we caught individuals that were looking in windows. We caught several people.”
The student who reported the recent incident said when she moved into her apartment the resident assistant put name tags on each of the doors. She said she could understand doing that in a dorm but not in a regular apartment complex.
She said she advises against this because if somebody knows there are two women living in one place and no men, they could become targets for sexual assault or other predatory crimes.
“When I first came here one of the things I liked the most about Logan was the security,” she said. “Right now I don’t feel insecure, but I don’t feel secure either. I’m not scared of going out at night because I know that the police will be there.”
USU Police Capt. Steve Milne said a woman called recently because she thought she heard somebody trying to open a window at her trailer court residence across from Aggie Village.
When police investigated they found footprints outside her home, but not where she said she heard the noise. Milne said anyone with information about these or related incidents should call USU police immediately.
– dan.whitney.smith@aggiemail.usu.edu