GILROY
A man entered a woman’s central Gilroy home through a window, attacked her in her bedroom and tried to rape her early Thursday morning.
The 100 block of West Fifth Street was quiet late Thursday morning, but before dawn, neighbors said they were woken up by raised voices and a woman repeatedly saying “get the hell out of here.”
About 4 a.m., the man entered the 30-year-old woman’s home through an open window usually used by the household pets, police said. He attacked the woman in her bedroom, where she was sleeping.
The struggle moved to the kitchen, where she armed herself with kitchen knives, which she used to fend off the man so that she could get outside. The man was bleeding when officers arrived and the woman believes she stabbed the man, though police don’t know where.
“It was a very chaotic scene and the woman doesn’t know where she stabbed the suspect,” said Sgt. Jim Gillio. “But there was physical evidence to support that he was stabbed and the officers also witnessed him bleeding.”
The woman managed to escape her home and ran to a nearby pay phone to call police. It was most likely the pay phone just a block away near the post office, Gillio said.
As the man ran after her, he “told her in no uncertain terms what his desires/intentions were,” according to a police press release.
The woman found a phone and called police, but was attacked again before she could talk with a 911 operator, police said. He then dragged her into some nearby shrubs, where police found them “seconds later,” according to the press release. The responding officer struggled briefly with the attacker before he managed to break away and flee. He was last seen running toward the 7600 block of Eigleberry, police said.
The man is a fair-skinned Hispanic, 5-feet, 9-inches and 180 pounds, police said. He is in his late 20s, is clean-shaven, and has medium-length dark brown or black hair.
The woman was physically unhurt but emotionally shaken, Gillio said. Police do not believe the suspect had a weapon.
The woman later said she has met the man before, but was introduced to him only by a nickname. Since then, he has made repeated attempts to contact her against her will but family members persuaded him to stay away from her home. However, they did not report this behavior to police. Police want to gather more information before releasing the man’s name or nickname, Gillio said.
Neighbor Alan Foden spent the night on the couch at the tutoring company he runs with Lucia Vega. The two moved their business into the white house on the northwest corner of Fifth and Eigleberry streets only two months ago and don’t know their neighbors well. A long day of finishing up the company’s billing cycle turned into a late night so he crashed on the couch at work, he said.
Foden woke up around the time of the attack when he heard a woman’s raised voice telling someone to “get the hell out of here” coming from the direction of the small garage-cum-studio apartment behind the tutoring center, he said.
Groggy and thinking it was just an argument, he didn’t call police because he didn’t hear screams or cries for help.
“Yelling is a good thing,” said Emma Lucas, assistant program director for the Solutions to Violence program at Community Solutions. “But each individual has to make their own decision about what self-defense means. For some, it means fighting back. For others, it means making sure they’re alive at the end of the situation. What’s important to understand is that women have options.”
Community Solutions offers self-defense classes to educate women about what their options are in the case of an attack. The classes include lessons in assertiveness, awareness and physical resistence techniques.
“It’s important as a community to take on the responsibility to increase safety for ourselves and those around us,” Lucas said. “If people are interested in learning about self-defense, they should give us a call.”
