A UC Berkeley junior is speaking out after surveillance cameras captured a homeless man scaling her apartment gate and chasing her inside the building.
Eden Winograd, a 21-year-old student, said Bay Area she had just returned from walking her dog Tuesday night when she first noticed the man watching her outside her off-campus complex in Berkeley, California. She crossed the street to create distance, not wanting to assume the worst about a stranger standing nearby.
“I started to panic a little bit, but I didn’t want to offend him if he was just standing there,” she said Bay Area, adding that she picked up her pace to get away. “I started speeding up and heard his feet banging on the floor behind me.”
Winograd buzzed herself through the security gate and kept walking, but the sound of metal clanging made her turn around. The man had begun climbing the entrance. “I went up to the gate, I buzzed myself in, I went, and I closed it, and then I heard clanging sounds while I was walking inside, and I turned around, and he was like scaling the gate,” she said.
Footage showed the suspect placing his feet on the door’s push bar before hopping over, carrying what authorities believe was a barbecue lighter. Winograd reached the elevator and called police, her body still flooding with adrenaline. “My heart sank, I was out of breath, my heart was pounding,” she said Bay Area.
She later posted the surveillance video to TikTok, where it has drawn more than one million views. The platform’s algorithm amplified a clip that shows what she described as every student’s off-campus nightmare: a secured entrance proving no barrier to someone determined to follow.
Berkeley Police located the suspect the following day lying on a sidewalk and took him into custody. The department has submitted the case to prosecutors for review, though charging decisions remain pending.
The incident has left Winograd shaken well beyond the single night. She has found herself replaying the what-ifs and recalibrating her sense of safety in a neighborhood she thought she knew. The trauma, she indicated, is not fading quickly.
“I don’t care if they have a weapon in their hand or nothing in their hand, I don’t want to be chased the second I step out of my apartment,” she said. “I don’t want to be chased and have to watch someone claw their way up a wall to get to where I live.”
Her TikTok post has become a focal point for broader conversations about student housing security in college towns where off-campus residents often depend on aging infrastructure and single-point entry systems. The video‘s virality has also drawn attention to gaps between campus police jurisdictions and municipal departments responsible for areas where thousands of students lease apartments.
Winograd’s experience highlights a pattern familiar to many who rent near large universities: the walk from transit or parking to a front door that can become vulnerable when someone exploits design features like push bars meant for emergency egress. The barbecue lighter the man carried, while not used to threaten her directly, added an unpredictable element that she said compounded her fear.
The suspect’s arrest came roughly 24 hours after the chase, with officers finding him in the same general area where the original encounter occurred. Police have not released his name or detailed his prior contact with law enforcement, if any.
Winograd continues to process the violation of having her living space breached by someone who refused to accept a locked gate as a boundary. Her decision to share the footage publicly, she has indicated, was driven partly by a desire to warn others who might assume their apartment entrances offer more protection than they actually do.
The case remains under prosecutorial review as of this report.