Woman found New Year’s ‘Peeping Tom’ in washroom

BY TRACEY DUGUAY

A Greater Sudbury woman was enjoying New Year’s Eve celebrations until a frightening incident happened in a hotel bathroom.

Anna Howard (not her real name) and her husband, along with four other couples, attended a dinner and dance at the Holiday Inn on Regent St. to ring in 2007.

As the party winded down around 1 am, the 53-year-old woman excused herself to use the ladies’ room. After using the facilities, Howard found herself staring into the eyes of a man who was lying on his back on the floor. The man’s head and part of his neck were in her stall and the rest of his body in the one next to it.

For a moment Howard says she couldn’t move or even breathe, she just stared at the man as he held her gaze, his face expressionless.

As the shock subsided, she started to yell and hurried out of the stall, panicked the man would try to seize her by the ankles to prevent her from getting away.

She ran into the hallway and approached a young couple walking by.

“Hey, there’s a guy in the ladies’ washroom,” she remembers saying to them. But at first the couple just looked at her, not sure if she was telling the truth or feeling the effects of too much holiday spirits.

“Come here, there’s a guy who was watching me pee,” she said, leading them into the washroom.

They looked under the bathroom stalls trying to find the alleged Peeping Tom who by then had crawled two or three stalls over and had his coat hung on the door blocking anyone from seeing in. In the last stall, they saw his boots and what looked like a cell phone with a red light flashing.

“Open the door,” yelled the man said  as he pounded on the door to the bathroom stall. “Open the f....ing door right now or I’ll call the cops.”

Howard describes the “Peeping Tom” as around 25 years old, 140 pounds with a slight build, brown eyes, pale complexion.

He wore a baseball cap with curls sticking out from under it. She also remembers an almost innocent looking expression on his face, “like he wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

They escorted the man out of the bathroom and warned him if he didn’t leave the hotel immediately, they’d call the police. Afterwards, Howard remembers saying to the couple that maybe they should have called the police.

“Just try and enjoy the rest of your evening,” she was told.

Shaking and traumatized, she returned to the hall and told her husband what happened. She just wanted to forget the incident ever happened.

“It was awful,”Howard says, adding she couldn’t sleep for a couple of nights. “I close my eyes at night and I can still see him.”

On New Year’s Day her husband informed the hotel  front desk clerk about what happened, and the incident was recorded in the hotel’s log book. Police weren’t called because the man was long gone.

“If she would have called the front desk immediately, they would have called the police right away,” says a manager from the hotel, who asked her name not be used. She wasn’t working that night.

While she says the hotel doesn’t have onsite security or video cameras, there is someone working the front desk 24/7 and there are cleaning crews who keep an eye out for problems at night.

According to Greater Sudbury Police Cst. Bert Lapalme in a situation like this the best thing to do is to leave the room, find the nearest phone and call the police.

“We never encourage people to get involved to this extent,” he says, when asked if Howard or anyone else should have confined the man in the washroom until police were called and attended the scene.

There are certain precautions people can take to minimize the risk of an incident like this, or the potential for other unnerving or dangerous situations, he says.

One key element is “awareness” or knowing what’s going on in the immediate surroundings, be it getting into a car in a deserted parking lot, walking to the bus or using a public washroom late at night. Use that “sixth sense” that can alert you to potential problems.

And, there’s also the tried-and-true “buddy system” because the chances are less likely you’ll be victimized if you are not alone.