A New Westminster woman is still a little freaked out after a man tried to enter her apartment through an open window early Friday morning.
Amanda Carvalho lives in a ground-floor suite in a building on Eighth Street just south of Sixth Avenue. She never leaves her windows open, but last night’s heat was just too much.
At about 1:15 a.m. Friday morning, Carvalho heard a noise outside her bedroom window.
“I was just lying in my bed, on my phone, and I heard tinkering outside, and then the outside light started flickering and that prompted me to get out of my bed. I grabbed my phone and then the light just went off,” she told the Record.
Carvalho went to the window and looked outside. In the darkness, she could see the silhouette of a man walking towards her bedroom window.
“I watched as this figure reached in my window,” she said.
As his hand passed through the open window, Carvalho shouted “Hey! Who’s out there? I have a phone and I’m calling the police.”
But she didn’t stick around to see if the man listened to her. Instead she took off and ran out of her suite and into the lobby of the building where she called 911.
When the officers arrived, they escorted Carvalho back into her suite and checked to see if the suspect had entered her apartment. They also checked outside, in case he was still hanging around. What they found outside, though, was that the suspect had tampered with the exterior light.
“I barely slept, I had nightmares,” she said of the experience, adding she spent the rest of the night at a friend’s house.
“I’m freaking out.”
Every summer, the New Westminster Police Department issues warnings to residents reminding them to keep all easily accessible windows and doors closed and locked, even in warm weather.
Carvalho, who usually keeps her window closed, won’t be opening it again, no matter how hot it gets, and she’s sharing her story as a cautionary tale for people who don’t think twice about leaving their windows open in the hot weather.
“If he (the suspect) tried to do this to me, what’s to say he’s not going to try and do this to someone else?
“I just want people to be careful. There’s someone out there that’s taking advantage of this heat wave.”
