Police Looking For Man Who Jumped Fence, Assaulted Young Girl
Jul 16, 2019, 10:24 PM | Updated: Jul 17, 2019, 5:37 am
KEARNS, Utah – The search is on in Kearns for a man who police say jumped a backyard fence and sexually assaulted a 5-year-old girl while she was playing.
“You don’t feel safe anymore on the streets,” said the girl’s mother, Brook Jensen. “I never in a million years thought this would happen to me.”
It was Friday, July 5, around 7:30 p.m. when Jensen says her daughter came frantically running inside.
“I tried to say, ‘What’s going on? What happened to you? Why are you upset?” Jensen said. “That’s when she had said that a man had jumped over the fence, had come up to her, had said she was her dad. She knew he was lying.”
The girl was in the backyard playing with her 8-year-old cousin. That cousin then went inside to use the restroom, and that’s when Jensen said the assault happened.
After an extensive interview process, police said they believe what the girl is saying.
“From what we can see, yes, it does look like it actually happened,” said Sgt. Melody Gray with the Unified Police Department.
Gray said the man touched the girl inappropriately over her clothing and then quickly took off, jumping back over the fence and into an orange car.
“This is not someone we want on the streets,” Gray said. “Someone that’s willing to go into someone’s yard and touch a child — that is someone we definitely need off the streets. (It’s) really hard to tell if he’s someone who lives in the area or potentially visiting.”
The description is very limited. Gray said all they have to go on is that the man is described as having facial hair and drove away in an orange car.
“So we are hoping that someone in the neighborhood maybe knows someone or knows something that may lead us to try and find a suspect because we don’t have a whole lot to go on,” said Gray.
Jensen said she’s a very protective mother who always keeps an eye on her daughter. However, she never thought something would happen while her daughter was playing in a fenced back yard.
“It can happen anywhere; it can happen anytime,” she said. “It can happen any place in your own fenced-in back yard in the middle of the day in a five-minute time span.”
“If there is any possible way of finding this man and prevent him from hurting or attacking other people,” Jensen added, “at least I feel like I’ve done something to bring her justice.”
Anyone with information is asked to call the Unified Police Department at 801-743-7000.
