Mesa woman: Man broke into home with an ax
Police are investigating after a Mesa woman says a young man broke into her house with an ax Sunday evening and hacked into the bathroom where she was hiding.
Erika Grijalva posted on Facebook early Monday morning that someone rang her doorbell and, after she ignored it because she was sleeping, smashed open the sliding glass door facing the backyard.
Her home is near Roosevelt Elementary School, close to Southern Avenue and Dobson Road in Mesa.
She wrote that she heard a man ask if anyone was home so she ran and locked herself in the bathroom. She heard him come into the bedroom and she told him she was calling 911.
“Then all I saw was an ax coming through the door,” Grijalva wrote. “This will be a sight and feeling I will NEVER move on from. I honestly thought he was going to hurt me with the ax once he got through, I had no idea what he wanted.”
The man asked for money but refused to take her credit and debit card or checkbook, so she gave him her laptop and tablet. And then he left, she said.
“As he walked out the back door he had just smashed in, he told me all he wanted was a few bucks and I never answered the doorbell,” she wrote. “Then he said he would pay for the sliding glass door he broke! I am shaken ... to my core.”
In the security camera video she posted, a young man can be seen ringing her doorbell multiple times, looking in her mailbox and waiting on the porch. She also posted a photo of her bathroom door, which appears to have been hacked open.
Less than two days after Grijalva posted about the encounter, her post has been shared more than 11,000 times and gotten more than 3,000 comments, many from people arguing about guns and drugs.
Mesa Police Department spokesman Steven Berry confirmed Tuesday that there is an ongoing investigation and that the department is looking for the man in the photos.
“We don’t have any information to believe it’s not true, based on the damage to the home and her story. Everything seems to line up, so were definitely looking for him,” Berry said.
Anyone with information can contact Mesa police at 480-644-2211.