Years of stage combat training at the University of Arts in Philadelphia paid off last week for Jameka Wilson, a 25-year-old actor.
On her way to an early morning exercise class, she was confronted and chased by a man wearing a Halloween mask that many observers have compared to the horror character Chucky. Recalling her training, she stopped, turned and delivered a kick to his chest, she said. That sent him running.
“Crazy things happen in Philadelphia, if I’m being honest,” Ms. Wilson said in an interview on Thursday. “So I assumed that this was just kind of a one-off event, probably someone I wouldn’t see again. I just didn’t assume that there was a pattern of behavior of targeting multiple people.”
But that turned out to be the case. Ms. Wilson was one of several pedestrians in the area who had reported seeing a man wearing the mask and walking aggressively toward people on the street that morning. And when she later shared her story of squaring up with the masked man in an interview with Philadelphia news outlets, she became a minor local celebrity.
The Philadelphia Police asked for the public’s help earlier this week in identifying the masked man, whom officials said had “made threatening comments while holding his hand behind his back” to a 40-year-old woman at around 5:30 a.m. on Aug. 12. Officials also released a video showing the woman — a jogger — running away from the man, who was dressed in dark clothing and wearing a mask styled after the character Chucky in “Child’s Play,” the 1988 horror film.
The police also said that the man caused the jogger to “stumble and sustain injury.”
On Thursday afternoon, the police identified a suspect, Zymire Hughes, 22, and said there was an arrest warrant for him.
Ms. Wilson, a Charlotte, N.C., native, said her run-in with the masked man happened around 5:20 a.m. that Wednesday, when she was walking in front of City Hall on her way to a SoulCycle class. She said she spotted the man across the street approaching another woman, who was wearing headphones and texting on her phone.
Ms. Wilson waved her arms to alert the other bystander. The woman saw Ms. Wilson’s waves, noticed the man, and then ran away. The masked man, according to Ms. Wilson, then pursued another man carrying a box around the corner. The man with the box escaped inside a shop.
The masked man then turned his sights on Ms. Wilson.
She said she ran, with the man chasing after her, for about five seconds. She turned the corner.
Ms. Wilson decided her best bet was to face him. “At that point, I would be able to see if he had any weapons,” she said.
And then, Ms. Wilson added, “I blocked my face, covered my centerline and then I kicked him.”
The blow caught the man off guard.
“It was clear he wasn’t prepared for me to kick him,” Ms. Wilson said, adding that to her he seemed to be unready to fight. She added, “And he just looked very disoriented and then he ran away.”
Within a day of the incident, she discovered that her interaction wasn’t isolated. Images of the masked man had begun spreading on social media, and she described her own experience in a comment on the Watch Out Philly Instagram page — an account dedicated to warning Philadelphians about “potentially harmful people” in the city.
Soon, local television outlets asked her for an interview, where she recreated the kick on camera, to the delight of commenters.
She has since been the subject of memes on multiple accounts. Strangers have made fan art of Ms. Wilson with her foot extended. (One is captioned: “OK well let’s see if you can fight.”)
She called it “a really beautiful thing to feel like I have a whole city behind me.”
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