She cried when a Canyon University student found the strange man’s hand reaching under a bathroom stall and trying to record her on his cell phone.
After that, the second year students began recording him.
“Why are you recording?” The student says in a video posted online she will stand up to the man who is all dressed in black and uses a jacket to hide his face. “No, wait! What a god!”
A video posted earlier this week depicts the latest updates on at least three similar incidents reported at the Santa Clarita campus over the past year. In response to one of the incidents, school officials sent warnings to students on March 6th, urging them to report similar episodes.
“We take students’ safety seriously, and all campus safety officials are explained about what happened and are wary of future incidents,” said school spokesman Eric Harnish.
The Man in Black video was posted earlier this week and accumulated thousands of views on Instagram. The student who recorded it told The Times, where the episode happened in October, but she didn’t publish it at that time as police and campus officials asked her not to “fall” the suspect. She finally released the video after learning of two similar incidents reported on campus over the past year.
Student video of male intruders in a women’s bathroom at College of the Canyons. (@protectthegirlss)
A student who asked not to be identified said the incident scared her and avoided the campus toilet. She is worried that more casualties will be there.
When she entered the bathroom of the Alisolab building on October 22nd, she saw someone at one of the food stalls, but it never happened to her that it might be a man who was trying to record her.
She was using two stalls in the bathroom from the suspect when she saw her reach under the food stall and targeting her with her cell phone camera facing her back.
“I was surprised,” she said. “I cried, ‘What hell’ and they pulled their phone back. ”
She went outside and pulled out her phone, hoping to get an image of the man’s face for the police. She pulled the man’s jacket, but he pushed her as he tried to open the door.
“He was pushing me hard,” she said. “He put me over my shoulder to keep me out of my way.”
In the video, the student is seen trying to expose the man by leaving the toilet and not pulling his jacket, and revealing his face, but the man passes her and runs across campus into the parking lot.
The student said she tried to chase him but lost him.
The student said she recently learned of two other similar cases, including an episode earlier this month. School officials confirmed that the third incident was reported on April 23.
Now, she said she is worried that other students may have been victimized in the same way.
School officials have sent warnings to students about the March 4 incident. There, the female student also said she saw a man calling under the stall and video of herself in the toilet. The incident occurred at 12:20pm in the bathroom on the second floor of Hasley Hall, according to a school email.
The victim of the incident, the second-year student who asked not to be identified, assumed that it was another female student in the age when she saw someone in a handicap stool in a woman’s toilet when she entered.
While she was using the toilet, a group of students came in and used the toilet to leave. As the room became quiet, she wondered if she was alone, peering under the food stall to see if the other food stalls were being occupied.
“I looked down and saw the man lying down, and his camera pointed at me,” she said.
She said she wouldn’t have seen the man if she hadn’t peered, but his phone was clearly pointing at her.
“I started screaming, I went crazy,” she said.
The man ran off the bathroom and by the time she grabbed her own and chased him, she said he was gone.
She said she went to campus security to report the incident. On Thursday, after a video of the October incident was posted, she contacted the Sheriff’s Office and said she had prepared a police report.
She said she hadn’t filed it before because she believed campus security would contact law enforcement.
She has since been afraid to go to the campus toilet herself.
A school spokesman confirmed that three incidents had been reported to school officials.
However, during the March incident, the victims were unable to clarify the suspect’s appearance, Harnish said.
“The incident was also reported to campus safety and we warned that it had happened to campus again,” Harnish said in an email. “The victim later submitted a report to Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station.”
A student who recorded an October episode said he first bought pepper spray by driving to a gas station the day after the incident.
Now she takes it with her everywhere.
“I’m scared every day,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep for a month. I couldn’t think straight. I lost all my sense of self. It was horrifying.”
She said she has received messages from other students since she posted the video.
“There’s nothing that hurts me physically, but mentally, this is what I carry,” she said.
