Jinean Robinson could have locked herself in her house and passed her nights in fear.
Instead, the woman who believes she had a close encounter with a rape suspect is organizing a hunt for him.
Robinson, 32, was taking out the trash from her home in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood of Atlanta on Dec. 18 when she sensed something moving behind her. She'd left her front door open, and when she came back inside, she heard a noise in her bathroom.
What she encountered there sent her screaming from her home: a man looking at her shower.
He fled with her iPhone, and Robinson reported the incident to police. She didn't think about it much again until she saw the "wanted" flier for a rape suspect that was posted in a nearby gas station.
On Dec. 26, according to Atlanta police, a man armed with a kitchen knife forced his way into a home on Rosedale Road in Virginia-Highland and raped a woman there.
Police circulated a sketch of the suspect, and a week later, on Jan. 2, Robinson stood frozen in place as she stared at the image, certain that it was the same man who had entered her home.
"The cashier, he was like, ‘Are you OK?'" Robinson told the AJC Tuesday. "I've never, ever felt the way I felt after I saw that poster."
Robinson decided to take some action. She and her helpers made "a gazillion" copies of that wanted poster, and they're planning to go door-to-door in and around the Virginia-Highland neighborhood Friday afternoon.
So far, 50 people have volunteered to help with the canvass, which is being promoted on a Facebook page. They'll be meeting at 2 p.m. in the parking lot of the CVS in the 800 block of Highland Ave.
The goal is to keep the investigation alive and to keep the tips rolling in to police.
"Let's do something with this fear instead of just sitting in our houses and locking the doors and windows," Robinson said.
Police say the suspect is a black man in his mid-40s who stands about 5-foot-8 and has little hair. He was "wearing a lot of dark clothes and had a very unpleasant odor," Officer Kim Jones, a police spokeswoman, said in December.
Police department spokesman Carlos Campos urged people to call 911 with any reports of suspicious activity, including a sighting of the suspect.
Campos said there are some indications that the suspect may be homeless and that investigators have visited homeless shelters. But he said police are not focusing exclusively on a homeless suspect.
Campos also cautioned that police had not, as yet, linked the rape to the incident in Robinson's home, so he asked that the canvassers not present the incidents as linked when they knock on doors. But he said community involvement is helpful.
"Any time the community gets involved in crime fighting and crime solving, it's very helpful to police," Campos said. "But we also hope that they do it in coordination with police."
Campos urged people to review details about the rape suspect on the Crime Stoppers website and circulate the information among their friends.
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