The sight of a man on a bike slipping through a condo garage gate lead to a heart-pounding encounter.
“Definitely afraid,” Raleigh Taufer, who owns a condo at the Mission Florence Condominiums, said.
Around 11 a.m. Tuesday, Taufer hopped in his SUV to go to the gym.
“I pressed the button to open gate. That's when the guy came down on his bike,” Taufer said.
The guy that made his skin crawl.
“His face was covered a masked and he had rubber gloves on,” Taufer said.
Taufer stopped and then reversed his SUV.
“I rolled down the window and said, ‘You need to get out of here.’ He ignored me and proceeded to go to the storage units and jiggle the handles,” Taufer said.
The sight was an infuriating one.
“I'm literally like this is not going to happen again. We find people down here all the time,” Taufer said.
This has happened a lot. In the past year, he said, just about every storage unit here has been broken into and so that morning. Taufer kept telling the man to scram.
“He threw his bicycle down and his arms up in a fight mode, and he jumped at the vehicle like he was going to open the door,” Taufer said.
Taufer said he saw the man carrying what looked like mace. Taufer took off, and called 9-1-1.
“I'm on the phone and I see him go into the building,” Taufer said.
Surveillance video shows them after he left the elevator and out the entrance.
At the same time, Taufer was circling the block and recorded some video before the man rode off.
“Just trying to be proactive in our building. We are fed up. We would like it to stop, but there’s just no give right now,” Taufer said.
As 10News was putting the story together on late Wednesday afternoon, Taufer said he may have spotted the same man riding near the complex again. He said he called police.
10News will let you know the result of this possible sighting.
