Intruder enters Yishun home through windows to evade cops
A man tried to climb down from the facade of a HDB block in Yishun. He entered a few houses before being arrested. A man tried to climb down from the facade of a HDB block in Yishun. He entered a few houses before being arrested. PHOTO: THE NEW PAPER
Published 11 hours ago
Elizabeth Law
This article was first published in The New Paper on July 13, 2015.
SINGAPORE (THE NEW PAPER) - For 20 agonising minutes, a mother and her three young children were stricken with fear when they were held captive in their Yishun flat on Sunday. A desperate intruder had broken into their home and was trying to escape the police. He was eventually arrested.
Speaking to The New Paper after the incident, Madam Suhadah Jumadi, 33, said she was getting ready to break fast in the living room with her children at their home in Block 431B, Yishun Avenue 1, when she saw a barefoot man walk out of her bedroom. He had climbed into her sixth-storey flat through the master bedroom window from the level above, breaking her window grilles. She had not heard him because the TV had been on and her children had been playing.
“The man told me not to call the police and he asked me to find a way to help him get away,” Madam Suhadah said.
Then, she heard a commotion at her door as well as sounds under the block. “I could see uniformed officers outside (the window on the first storey), as well those knocking on my door (through the peephole). “That’s when I knew he was a wanted man,” she said.
The human resource and accounts manager was worried for the safety of her three children, aged two, five and seven.
She said: “He had a pouch with him, but I didn’t know what was inside. What if he had a gun or a knife and wanted to hurt us? It was just me, my children and the maid at home.” Her husband is on a work trip overseas.
The man, who had a shaven head and tattoos, told her not to open the door for the police officers. When Madam Suhadah’s maid tried to do so, he immediately slammed it shut. “My children got scared and the younger two started crying. He told me to control my children and (added) that he just wanted our cooperation.” That was when she told him to escape through the kitchen.
But Madam Suhadah could not find the keys to the window grilles. This made the man increasingly anxious.
“Out of desperation, he broke the grilles and climbed out. Before leaving, he told me ‘God bless you’. “Then he saw that I had opened the door for the police and he uttered (an expletive),” she added.
A police spokesman confirmed the incident, saying they received a call for assistance at about 7.25pm.
The 41-year-old man was caught by the police on another storey. He is assisting police with investigations.
The New Paper understands that the case is believed to involve drugs and that the man was staying at one of the units in the block. When TNP visited Madam Suhadah’s home at about 9.15pm yesterday, her relatives were helping her put cable ties on her window grilles. Visibly shaken, she said her family had been living in the flat for less than a year, but were now so traumatised by the incident that she wanted to rent it out. Police officers were seen questioning residents of the unit directly above Madam Suhadah’s flat. A woman in the unit declined to comment when approached. At about 11pm, police sniffer dogs were taken to the unit. They stayed for about 10 minutes.
The man is believed to have climbed from a seventh-storey unit into Madam Suhadah Jumadi’s unit on the sixth storey using a rope made of bedsheets or curtains.
He is then believed to have left Madam Suhadah’s sixth-storey unit via the kitchen window, and then climbed down to the third storey, where he entered Mr Tan Cheng Hoon’s unit. There he was eventually nabbed by the police.
It prompted Dr Lee Bee Wah, MP for Nee Soon GRC, to pay a visit and post on her Facebook page.
