Woman grabs knife, fights off intruder who climbed into her Bolton Hill bed

Rachel Cooper went to bed in her Bolton Hill home on Thursday night like any other. Before retiring, she locked the doors and activated the security system.

As she lay sound asleep, a noise in her bedroom suddenly awakened her around 3 a.m. Friday. She thought it might have been one of her cats, restless in the night. She called out Tamago’s name, but the cat didn’t appear.

She scanned the dark room, trying to make out the figure at the end of her bed. That’s when she saw him. Yes, him: a stranger hovering above the foot of her bed, staring at the boxes in the corner. It was not a dream. It was a real-life nightmare.

“I realized that this wasn’t my housemate; it wasn’t a prank,” Cooper said. “This was a stranger in my bedroom.”

The man walked to her bedside and stared at her as he lit a cigarette. Her first thought was, “that’s kind of rude, it’s going to stink up my room,” she said.

“But it was also really sinister that he was just sort of taking it in and enjoying himself and lighting a cigarette as he looked at me, which really frightened me,” she added.

Ironically, Cooper had spent the day in a State Department counterthreat training course for work. The training, she said, taught her how to get out of an attacker’s hold and keep screaming until bystanders become alert to the situation. In the shadows of her bedroom, that training flashed across her mind.

“What do you want? Who are you,” Cooper demanded from the man. There was no response.

She asked if she could turn on the lamp. He said no, she recalled, and instead asked where her phone was. On the bedside table, Cooper replied. She could see him feeling for her phone in the dark, a test to confirm she was telling the truth. Then he spoke.

“I’m not going to rape you,” he said, according to Cooper.

A flood of discomfort washed over Cooper. A normal person wouldn’t say some something like that, she thought.

What happened next was worse. The man climbed on top of Cooper. He touched her body and pressed his face against hers. As she tried to put space between herself and the attacker, he spoke again.

“Don’t make me shoot you,” he said. “I’m going to pull you on my lap.”

“No,” Cooper responded sharply. She waited a few moments. When she felt the time was right, she quickly scooted away from the man and ran.

“I would rather be shot at, possibly even shot, than just lie there and let him do whatever he wanted,” she said. “I just sort of decided to take that chance.”

The man caught up. He grabbed her, and a struggle ensued.

But Cooper’s fight instincts kicked in. She began throwing elbows and punches. She hit him in the face. She knocked one of the lenses out of his glasses.

Her adrenaline pumping, Cooper got out of her bedroom, she said. She ripped a decorative knife from the wall and took a battle stance, screaming and hurling threats at him. Panicked, she said, the man scurried down the stairs and out of her front door, triggering her home alarm, waking her housemate and prompting him to call the police.

Terrified, she watched as he broke into a sprint down the street.

The Baltimore Police Department’s investigation of the incident is ongoing.

“It’ll take me a while to really feel safe here in my home and in my room,” she said in her living room Sunday. The same knife she used to threaten her attacker is now stashed under the pillow she rests her head on at night.

After the attack, Cooper said, she called her parents in Pittsburgh. The pair drove up as soon as light broke and spent the last couple of days turning her home into a fortress.

“The emotion that has been dominant the whole time is rage, at that man in particular but at any man or men who think they have the right to terrorize women,” Naomi Weisberg Siegel said on Sunday as she sat with her daughter.

In Bolton Hill, a historic, tree-lined neighborhood that is home to sprawling 19th century townhomes and Victorian-era mansions, residents have experienced seven robberies and seven burglaries this year, police data shows. There have also been seven aggravated assaults.

Residents in neighborhood groups have used social media to share news of break-ins and other crimes. It is how they look out for one another.

Cooper was no different.

Early Friday morning, she posted about her ordeal in the Bolton Hill Community Association group on Facebook. Although she did not get a good look, she described her attacker as a young to middle-aged Black man wearing “a lightweight bomber jacket and light jeans, black sneakers with white soles,” who was of an average and slim build with thick prescription eyeglasses and a scruffy beard.

Her post included security camera footage that showed the man fleeing. According to Cooper, cameras from neighboring homes also captured footage of her assailant.

One camera, she said, caught the man attempting to break into another apartment roughly one block away before he moved on to Cooper’s home.

Additional footage from a next-door neighbor, she said, showed the man lingering in Cooper’s backyard before he broke in. Cooper said her home is equipped with sensors at each entry point that would have triggered the security system. But the alarm didn’t go off until he fled.

She believes the man may have entered through one of the large, door-height windows at the rear of her home. The window had a broken latch that she surmised he jiggled until it opened.

“He did not steal anything as far as we can tell, which makes it feel more like a targeted attack with possible sexual motive,” she said in the post.

She added: “I do want to encourage people not to jump to any conclusions about people you may see out and about because there are probably upstanding community members in this neighborhood who also match that description.”