A Winnipeg woman says a terrifying break-in earlier this week lasted just a few minutes, but the shock and trauma have lasted days. Amber Trails resident Dede Mohajeri was asleep Monday morning when a noise outside her bedroom stirred her awake a little before six o’clock. “I’m thinking it’s my husband,” Mohajeri told CTV News. “So, I see someone pass my room going down the stairs, and I start calling my husband’s name. He’s not answering me, so I’m thinking, ”What’s going on?” Mohajeri said she could hear the person moving around on the two-storey house’s main level when she realized her husband, who suffers from sleep apnea, was still snoring in the other room. Mohajeri said she peered down the staircase to see who was shuffling around. “So, I said, who’s there? And the person actually comes in front of the door and I see his legs,” she recalled. “And that’s when I knew someone was in my house and I got so scared.” She later learned the man had climbed onto the house’s front porch railing, pulled himself onto an awning, and entered through a second-storey window – into her 19-year-old daughter’s bedroom. Mohajeri said, thankfully, her daughter wasn’t in the room at the time. “And that’s the part that scares me. Because if she was in that room, what could happen? You don’t know.” When Mohajeri confronted the intruder near the front door, she said he looked confused and appeared to be under the influence. “I asked him, how did you get into my house? And he says, ‘I don’t know.’ And I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ He goes, ‘I think I’m in the wrong house.’” She let the man leave through the front door without incident and called police immediately. In a statement to CTV News Winnipeg, a Winnipeg Police Service spokesperson confirmed officers responded shortly after 6 a.m. Monday. “Officers spoke with the homeowner who advised them that there were no threats, assault, damage or theft stemming from the incident and relayed they simply wanted the male removed from the area,” the spokesperson wrote. The spokesperson went on to say officers found a “confused” 20-year-old man in the area and provided him assistance. They noted no charges stemmed from this incident. “Even if I did [pursue] charges, he’s going to come out again and he’s going to go to someone else’s house,” Mohajeri said. “I’m just getting to the point where – what is the city going to do about this?” She now thinks police should be patrolling neighbourhoods like Amber Trails more frequently and urges her neighbours to speak up when they see crime or suspicious activity happening. She added people, including the man who broke into her home, need better access to treatment and support. “I actually did feel bad for him,” Mohajeri said. “And I think that’s for a lot of people out there. They need the help and they don’t know where to turn.”
