On October 24 according to Fairfax County police, a man took a ladder from the yard of a house in Hybla Valley Farms and used it to climb onto the house’s roof. A resident of the home, who did not want to be named, said she and her husband were in bed at about 11 p.m. when they heard the ladder hit the wall. Her husband ran outside while she ran to the upstairs bedroom shared by her five and three-year-old daughters. She said she heard the man outside the children’s window and that he jumped off the roof after she turned to call 911.
It was the third incident in eight days involving a mysterious intruder in the vicinity of young girls. The three houses where the incidents occurred are each about one mile from one another in Hybla Valley.
On Oct. 16, a six-year-old girl reported that she had awoken to find a masked man in her bedroom. Police were called to the home on Fairchild Drive after the girl told her mother the next day. And on Oct. 21 a man in a black mask nearly abducted a seven-year old girl from her backyard, according to a police report. At about 2:30 in the afternoon the girl was walking into her backyard on Grey Goose Way in the Hybla Valley area when the man grabbed her from behind and wrapped her in his arms. The girl hit him in the face, pushed his arms off and ran away. The girl was uninjured and the man fled on foot towards Lockheed Boulevard. Detectives are investigating whether those two crimes could have been committed by the same person, but are currently treating them as separate incidents, said police spokesman Tina Prescott.
The police report for the latest crime said detectives found no indication that the person was attempting to enter the children’s room. It added that because the three are “different types of encounters” and involve suspects of different descriptions, “police do not believe these three incidents are related.”
The suspect in the incident on Grey Goose Way was described as a black man about 6 feet 2 inches tall and 200 pounds. He wore a gray and yellow long-sleeved shirt, yellow pants and a black mask.
Greg Kotteman, the Mount Vernon Station’s crime prevention officer wrote in an email after that incident that residents of the Hybla Valley area need to be cautious. “Parents, please have a talk with your children about the importance of letting you know, as soon as possible, if something that scared them happens,” Kotteman wrote. Mount Vernon crime prevention officers will visit homes and provide safety surveys and advice on crime prevention. They can be reached by calling 703-360-8928.