When a student at College of the Canyons caught a strange man’s hand reaching out under a bathroom stall and trying to record her with his phone, she yelled out.
Then the two-year student started to record him.
“Why are you recording?” the student says in a video posted online, as she confronts the man who is dressed all in black and using a jacket to hide their face. “No, hold on! What the hell!”
The video posted earlier this week depicts the latest of at least three similar incidents reported at the Santa Clarita campus in the past year. In response to one of the incidents, school officials sent out an alert to students on March 6, urging them to report any similar episodes.
“We take the safety of our students seriously, and our Campus Safety officers have all been briefed on what occurred and are on alert for future incidents,” said school spokesperson Eric Harnish.
The video of the man in black was posted earlier this week and has amassed thousands of views on Instagram. The student who recorded it told The Times the episode happened in October but she didn’t publish it at the time because police and campus officials asked her not to so as to not “tip off” the suspect. She finally published the video after she learned of two similar incidents reported at the campus in the past year.
The student, who asked not to be identified, said the incident has left her scared, avoiding campus restrooms. She worries more victims may be out there.
When she walked into the bathroom in the Aliso Lab building on Oct. 22, she saw someone in one of the stalls, but it never occurred to her that it might be a man, trying to record her.
She was using the bathroom — two stalls away from the suspect — when she saw a hand reaching under the stall and aiming a cell phone camera at her backside.
“I freaked out,” she said. “I yelled out, ‘What the hell,’ and they pulled their phone back.”
She walked out and pulled out her own phone, hoping to get an image of the man’s face for police. She said she pulled at the man’s jacket but he pushed her as he tried to pull the door open.
“He was pushing me hard,” she said. “He put his shoulder into me to push me out of the way.”
In the video, the student is seen trying to keep the man from leaving the bathroom and pulling on his jacket, trying to expose his face but the man pushed passed her and is seen running across campus to a parking lot.
The student said she tried to run after him but lost him.
The student said she recently learned of two other similar incidents, including an episode earlier this month. School officials confirmed a third incident was reported on April 23.
Now, she said, she’s concerned other students may have been victimized the same way.
School officials sent out an alert to students about a March 4 incident, where a female student said she too saw a man taking video of her inside the restroom by holding a phone under the stall. The incident, according to the school email, occurred at 12:20 p.m. in the second-floor restroom of Hasley Hall.
The victim in that incident, a second-year student who asked not to be identified, told The Times she also saw someone in the handicap stall of the women’s restroom when she went in, and assumed it was another female student.
While she was using the restroom, a group of students went in, used the restroom and left. When the room quieted, she wondered if she was alone and peeked under her stall to see if the other stalls were occupied.
“I looked down and I saw a man laying down, with his camera pointing toward me,” she said.
The man would not have been visible if she hadn’t peeked, she said, but his phone was clearly pointed toward her.
“I started screaming, I was freaking out,” she said “Once he noticed he got caught, he shuffled out into his stall.”
The man ran out of the bathroom and, by the time she grabbed her stuff and ran after him, she said he was gone.
She said she went to campus security to report the incident. On Thursday, after the video was posted of the October incident, she said she reached out to the Sheriff’s Department and made a police report.
She said she hadn’t filed it earlier because she believed campus security was going to contact law enforcement.
Since then, she’s been afraid to go to into campus restrooms by herself, she said.
A school spokesperson confirmed the three incidents have been reported to school officials.
During the March incident, however, the victim was unable to clearly get a look of the suspect, said Harnish.
“That incident was also reported to Campus Safety, and we again alerted the campus to what occurred,” Harnish said in an email. “The victim later filed a report with the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station.”
The student who recorded the October episode said that the day after the incident, she drove to a gas station and bought pepper spray for the first time.
Now she takes it with her everywhere.
“I’m scared, every day,” she said. “For a month I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think straight. I lost all sense of self. It was horrible.”
Since she posted the video, she said, she’s received messages from other students who told her they were unaware of any of the incidents.
“Nothing hurt me physically but, mentally, this is something I’m carrying,” she said.
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