istock

istock

Lake Highlands resident Paris Sunio, who also was the subject of a 2012 Advocate article, was almost the victim of a burglary at his Lake Highlands home last Friday. Instead, he came face-to-face with the perpetrator and successfully scared him off.

Sign up for our newsletter!

* indicates required

Sunio says he hopes that sharing his account will lead to better awareness and security in the Lake Highlands neighborhood.

Sunio was working from his home Friday morning, which is not his regular routine. Someone rang the doorbell but he didn’t answer, assuming it was a solicitor.

The visitor was knocking fairly incessantly — 10 times or so — so Sunio got up to have a look. As he peered through the blinds he saw a “slender African American guy about 5’10, about 19 years old, with low-sagging jeans and an afro-style hairdo” walking away.

The man entered the passenger side of a green or blue-ish early 2000s Nissan Altima.

“I couldn’t see the driver from my vantage point,” Sunio says. “I see them drive off and check to see if he stops at any neighbors house, but they don’t. It somewhat alarmed me; why they would knock on my house, but whatever. I go back to work in my office.”

About five to ten minutes later, Sunio says his power went out. He eventually goes outside to see if the neighbors have lost power too. They had not.

Then, he says, he has this eerie feeling that someone has purposely cut the power.

“Our main power switch is outside of my master bedroom window looking into the backyard. So I quietly go to that window to see if anyone is messing with my power switch, and I see a shadow. I crack open the blinds and see a big African American guy, maybe mid 20s, probably 190-ish pounds, with short dreadlocks and a solid black T-shirt — he’s two feet from me. I think there was another guy with him, maybe the passenger driver…”

So Sunio, running on adrenaline, opens the blinds and begins screaming. “Intruder! Intruder! Police! Police! Police!”

The startled man punches the window. His face, just inches from the homeowner’s, is “pissed off and scary,” Sunio says.

Sunio immediately calls 911 to report the incident. Five minutes later, another knock at the front door. “Thank god, it’s the police this time,” he says.

Screen Shot 2014-04-19 at 8.37.36 PM

Breached fence at the Sunio residence

As Sunio and the police investigated the property, they noticed that four slats of wood had been removed from the back fence. The alley behind it is virtually unused, Sunio says. That must have been how they entered the property after they guessed no one was home. They had turned off the power to bypass an alarm. (Sunio says he does have an alarm that runs on a backup power source).

The L Streets area resident says he is just relieved that his wife and daughter were not home at the time and that nothing worse happened.

Turns out that just before Sunio’s ordeal, a woman in the Old Lake Highlands area had warned neighbors, via the social site Nextdoor.com that a suspicious dreadlocked man in a metallic-blue Nissan Altima had knocked on her door and walked away before she came out; when she hollered after him to inquire what he wanted, he asked her if she needed her lawn cut. However, the woman reports, her lawn was freshly mowed. Plus the guy was in a Nissan with no apparent machinery with which to mow a lawn.