Woman calls police after finding ‘naked peeping Tom’ on patio
AUSTIN, Texas (KXAN) – An Austin woman is warning her neighbors after looking through the blinds early Thursday morning to see a man – fully nude – standing on the other side of her sliding glass door.
It’s not the first time something like this has happened in the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood.
“I was hanging out at home last night,” the woman, who asked not to be identified, said in an interview Thursday. “It was probably two or three in the morning and I kept hearing sounds outside.”
She didn’t see anything on the patio the first couple times she looked out, so she assumed it was neighbors or possibly raccoons, which have caused problems in the past.
She looked out one more time when she heard another noise.
“There was a man standing on the other side of my sliding glass door completely naked with his hands on his hips, like power stance,” she said, “just standing there very close to the door.”
“It’s the kind of thing that if it happened, you know, just down the street I’d probably laugh,” the woman added. Instead she called police. “I don’t know what his intentions are. I don’t know if he’s trying to break in and get in, I don’t know if he’s going to break the glass, if there’s somebody else out there, too.”
The woman took to the social site Reddit to warn her neighbors around the area of Speedway and 45th Street, titling the post, “Naked peeping tom visited me in Hyde Park tonight.” She got a lot of responses, including from people who had similar experiences.
“Hey!” one poster wrote back. “I also live in Hyde Park and this happened to me, too.”
The woman said several of her friends have dealt with peeping Toms as well, both in and outside of the neighborhood.
In September 2016, police arrested a man, Richard Langer, nearby after a woman caught him looking through windows and called 911, one of several reports police received about it.
And in May, at least six women reported being groped by a man while they were running or walking in Hyde Park. Police described him as in his 20s to 30s with a thin, athletic build.
WISH-TV’s sister station KXAN reached out to the Austin Police Department and asked if there had been other incidents similar to this nearby; a spokeswoman said the department is “not aware” of any other recent reports. It was not known at the time of publication if any arrests have been made in that case.
But other neighbors told KXAN they had heard about a naked man walking around the neighborhood in recent months. One said she was warned not to use a shared laundry space because a nude man had been spotted there before.
The woman who posted her story to Reddit said it’s just a fact of life here. “Sad to say that,” she said, “but you do get kind of used to just, like, watching your back all the time.”
The APD spokeswoman said police responded to the 911 call and searched the area, but didn’t find the man, adding if anyone sees a suspicious person, they shouldn’t hesitate to call police.