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Around 5:30 in the morning August 18, a young woman sleeping inside her home on Byron Avenue in North Beach was woken up by an intruder who had entered her bedroom. The woman didn’t know the man, but he seemed to know her, calling her by her first name. In Spanish, he also said that he was from Cuba and that he wouldn’t hurt her. But he forcibly performed oral sex on the woman despite her pleas to stop.
Finally, 45 minutes later, the sexual predator shined a flashlight on a clock on the woman’s nightstand — presumably to check the time — and ran off. The suspect is still on the loose.
“It’s a very odd individual,” Miami Beach Police spokesman Ernesto Rodriguez tells New Times, “a very scary individual.”
Yesterday, Rodriguez says, DNA tests confirmed that the suspect, described by the victim as a thin man between the ages of 30 and 40, is also linked to other sexual assault cases in Coral Gables and Miami.
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Police have been searching for the suspect as far back as 2013 for his possible involvement in dozens of stalking and sexual assault cases; the man is now being dubbed by the media as the “Serial Creeper.”
“It’s just someone who needs to be taken off the streets,” Rodriguez says. “He’s been a threat for quite some time.”
Yesterday, after the DNA connection was made between the August 18 assault and other cases, Miami Beach Special Victims Unit officers went door to door around the neighborhood of the attack, warning residents and looking for possible leads.
The search effort will be expanded, Rodriguez says.
“If something seems out of the ordinary or just stands out, call police,” he says, “because it’s going to those types of tips that will help us.”
