A Bankers Hill couple awoke to a nearly naked homeless man at the foot of their bed demanding clothes Sunday morning.
Dylan Renfro and his boyfriend were asleep when they heard their dog barking at 6:30 a.m.
“My first sight when I woke up was a silhouetted man at the foot of my bed,” said Renfro.
Renfro said he immediately got up, turned the lights on, and demanded that the man leave.
The man, who was only wearing boxers, continued to demand clothes and say he wasn’t going to hurt the couple, according to Renfro.
“I tried to reason with him. I threw clothes at him, the first thing I could find nearby, and once he had clothes, he kept demanding shoes. And I saw that this could turn into something more,” Renfro told NBC 7. “He kept saying, ‘I’m not a bad person, I’m not a bad person.’”
Renfro’s boyfriend tried to discreetly call the police, but when the man spotted him he became “more erratic and just more demanding.”
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Quick on his feet, Renfro said he had shoes outside. The man then went outside, and Renfro shut the door behind him and locked it.
“He was obviously in a panic,” the Bankers Hill homeowner said. “He was looking for necessities, he needed something to wear.”
Renfro said the man appeared to be under the influence of a substance.
As for how the man got into the Bankers Hill home, Renfro said he “forcefully” broke in. The house has two doors in the front entrance, and the inside one was locked, according to Renfro.
“He busted his way through and very quickly,” Renfro told NBC 7. A large crack could be seen in the couple’s doorframe.
Police came to the house on Curlew Street shortly after the man left.
Officers then found the man a few blocks away and arrested him.
“In those kinds of situations, you think of just surviving. I didn’t know what I was going to have to do to get him out. Very scary,” Renfro said.
Though, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened in their neighborhood, Renfro told NBC 7.
Renfro said someone jumped through a neighbor’s window and ran through the house screaming a month ago. “Things like this are happening often.”
The couple used Nextdoor to post about their break-in and learn about others in the area. Nextdoor is a social network for neighborhoods to stay updated.
He didn’t pause before taking the break-in to his local representatives.
“As soon as it happened, I emailed our mayor, our city councilmen,” he said. “Temporary things like, you know, the cops coming helps in the moment, but what are we doing in the long term?”
In an email to Mayor Kevin Faulconer, Renfro asked to learn more about the public policies in effect to help homelessness right now and what long-term solutions the city is planning.
Faulconer addressed the homelessness crisis in his fifth State of the City address earlier in January.
The mayor said his approach to fixing the problem is "housing first, but not housing only."
Renfro said he was “even more concerned about the health and the safety of these homeless people, what they’re doing, what they’re getting themselves into, and the effects that it has on our community.”
In the meantime, Renfro and his boyfriend are looking into ways to make themselves safer, including stronger locks and surveillance cameras.
The San Diego Police Department and Renfro both said the man appeared to be homeless.
