Aurora – Police think a man who broke into a woman’s apartment on East Mexico Avenue before dawn Saturday may be the same man responsible for at least nine sexual assaults and two more break-ins in southeast Denver, Arapahoe County and Aurora since November.
Aurora police also think some of the woman’s neighbors might have gotten a look at the suspect – without his stocking mask – as he ran away.
Aurora police officer Marcus Dudley said a sketch artist will work with neighbors in the hope of getting a more detailed description.
The woman said the intruder was about 6-foot-1 and weighed 210 to 220 pounds.
“He looked athletic,” she said.
The woman said police may have gotten fingerprints from her home.
It was about 5:30 Saturday morning when the young woman, who asked not to be identified because the suspect has not been caught, heard a strange rattling noise.
“But I figured it was just the sprinklers outside,” she said, so she tried to go back to sleep.
Seconds later, though, the blinds on her sliding glass door began to move back and forth.
Then, she saw a man – tall, athletic, all in black and wearing a mask – walk into her apartment.
She screamed.
He ran out.
“It was the scariest experience of my entire life,” the woman said Sunday afternoon. And although it was nearly 90 degrees outside, she shivered.
Last month, DNA analysis confirmed three sexual assaults in Aurora were committed by the serial rapist who has attacked at least six other women in the Denver metro area since November.
Although several people in the woman’s neighborhood said they were not aware that they should be on the lookout for a serial rapist, the woman whose apartment was broken into said she always keeps her door locked.
The woman, who moved here from San Diego several months ago to attend school, said police questioned her about where she had been the previous day. They want to figure out whether the rapist chooses victims in some public place and follows them home or randomly selects homes to break into, she said.
Just thinking that he is out there, that he might be in the same store or restaurant as she is, gives her the creeps, she said.
She said she ordinarily wouldn’t have been alert so early on a Saturday but she had just returned from taking a friend to the airport.
“I just keep thinking if I hadn’t done that, the whole thing could have turned out very, very differently.”
Aurora police ask anyone with information about the assaults to call 303-739-6147.
