Man breaks into White Center home, crawls into child’s bed

KING COUNTY, Wash. — The King County Sheriff’s Office says they’re looking for a man who crawled into a 3-year-old girl’s empty bed, after breaking into her family’s White Center home on October 3.

“Every time we come home she doesn’t want to go in,” says Claudia Rojas. She says her daughter has lost her sense of security after the young child found the man in her bed the next morning.

“If the doors are closed she’s like, ‘Mommy, is that man inside?’”

Rojas says her daughter and 1-year-old were sleeping with her at the time, and didn’t hear the man break into their home. Once she found him in the bed, she started shouting, “I told him to leave the house or I’m going to call the police. He was getting so aggressive that he pushed me on my shoulders into the wall.”

The man left and Rojas quickly called 911. That’s when she discovered he had been to other homes that same night.

“We’re obviously very, very concerned because that’s someone that wasn’t deterred at the first burglary,” says Sgt. Tim Meyer with the King County Sheriff’s Office.

Meyer says at the first home he broke into, he smashed through a back-door window. That set off the alarm and he quickly left. Deputies add he walked up to two other homes, but didn’t break in. They go on to say they believe Rojas’s home was the 4th house he stopped at that night.

Investigators are hoping someone recognizes the suspect and turns him in. Rojas hopes his arrest will make it easier to communicate to her 3-year-old daughter that she’s safe.

“It’s so hard to explain to her that he’s not coming back,” she says. “That nothing is going to happen.”

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