Police cordoned off an east Denver neighborhood and began house-to-house searches after a man fitting the description of a serial rapist linked to at least nine Denver-area rapes attacked a woman outside her home.
The intensive search began about 7:45 p.m. when a man wearing all black attacked the woman as she got out of her vehicle in front of a home in the 600 block of Jersey Street.
The woman screamed loudly, alerting a neighbor who is a police officer. He ran to help the woman, but the man had already fled on foot, said police spokesman Sonny Jackson.
The attacker was described as similar to the man linked to at least nine sexual assaults in Denver and Aurora over the past year.
“We’re definitely looking at the similarities between these cases,” Jackson said, but he could not confirm whether police believed it was the same man.
A police helicopter with night-vision capabilities was circling the area within minutes of Tuesday’s attack as officers set up a perimeter between Jasmine and Holly streets and 6th and 8th Avenues, an area of roughly 12 blocks near University Hospital. The area was closed for more than three hours as police searched houses, bushes and cars and offered escorts to frightened residents just returning home.
The victim was working with detectives to get a more detailed description of the attacker, Jackson said. Police would not comment on the extent of the woman’s injuries but said she had been taken to a nearby hospital.
Jackson said investigators were confident of the suspect’s motive.
“We feel like this was an attempted sexual assault,” he said.
Area resident Suzanne Mariner said she was surprised the attacker would choose her neighborhood, which she described as tightknit.
“You can say we’ve been on heightened alert lately,” she said, as officers searched her neighbor’s bushes. “We’re a neighborhood watch neighborhood and we really look out for each other. This guy really picked the wrong place.”
The serial rapist is wanted in nine confirmed sex assaults, dating to November. He has been described as a muscular black man, weighing 170 to 200 pounds, 6 foot to 6 foot 3 and bald, with a mark or a scar on his nose.
Last month, DNA analysis linked three sexual assaults that occurred during evening hours in residential areas in Aurora to the suspect. He also has attacked at least six women in Denver.
He is also suspected in three other attempted rapes, most recently of a 16-year-old girl in Denver. The victim was walking home Oct. 14 when she was approached by the suspect about 10:30 p.m., in the 900 block of South Quince Street, near Fairmount Cemetery, police said. The victim said the man pulled her into bushes and attempted to sexually assault her, but she escaped. She ran to her home and reported the incident.
Last month, a man believed to be the serial rapist narrowly escaped injury when a would-be victim fired a shot at him as he stood in her bedroom doorway, Aurora police said.
That occurred just a few blocks from where another break-in took place eight days earlier.
In that case, another young woman heard a strange rattling noise. Then she noticed the blinds on her sliding glass door began to move and saw a tall, athletic-looking man dressed in black walk into her apartment. He fled when she screamed.
