PLEASANT PRAIRIE, Wis. — A grandmother and her grandchildren are safe after a naked man invaded their home in Pleasant Prairie on June 6.
Speaking exclusively to host Libby Collins of Wisconsin’s Weekend Morning News, 59-year-old Mary Swanson of Pleasant Prairie talks about what happened just after 3pm as she was watching her two young grandchildren.
Swanson, who is in a wheelchair and in a “boot” after foot surgery, heard her 18-month-old granddaughter laughing at a “creepy” voice from another room. Thinking it was her older grandchild who had come home, she wheeled herself into the room to find a stranger talking to the baby.
“He was like talking to my granddaugther who was in her high chair across the kitchen, over the [baby] gate, and into the family room. He was giggling at her,” said Swanson. She started screaming at him as he was crunched down under a cabinet in the kitchen.
Swanson then smashed a nearby baby gate into the wall, scaring the man who then ran through the kitchen and became trapped in the foyer.
“He started talking in a baby voice to me, saying ‘Please, please don’t hurt me. You’re scaring me’ although I was screaming at the top of my lungs.”
Then she realized the stranger was naked, wet, and covered in mud.
Swanson got out of her wheelchair, yelling at the stranger, and ended up throwing a candle at him, missing him, while yelling at her 4-year-old grandson to stay out of the room.
She said that none of the throwing of objects phased the stranger but “my force, my facial features, my force of it… I could visibly see it did scare him.”
“He started again with this creepy, creepy crying… but he was giggling in between them”.
Swanson said the stranger’s legs started to buckle, but she was determined that he was not going to leave the foyer or get to her grandchildren. She said he literally slithered across her front door and then ran “and was screaming he’s sorry but running very fast.”
She said Pleasant Prairie Police found and arrested the man about 30 minutes later in a nearby field hiding in the grass. “But once the police found him, he claimed he has no recollection of coming in our home, no recollection of meeting the kids, nothing. And he had a black t-shirt on and a checkered shirt over it.”
Police also confirmed for Swanson that the suspect had likely been on the property before. “When the officers got her, they said their dogs were picking his scent up everywhere. He must have been here prior because he came in with my dog and shut my screen door very, very carefully so he was somewhere in there to have been able to do that”.
The suspect is currently in custody in the Kenosha County jail. WTMJ is not naming him until charges are filed.
