St. Tammany News

Covington's peeping tom struck four times over the July 27 weekend, giving police more information about his attack patterns, a better physical description and an end in sight for the city's longtime menace.

The latest physical descriptions the police have gathered indicate the man is tall, has a muscular build, thick brown hair and is Caucasian, Covington Police Lt. Jack West said. West also believes the man is hiding in unoccupied houses around the neighborhood to avoid being captured.

From now on police will be expanding their searches of the sighting areas to include such houses, he said.

Through the additional searches police believe it is only a matter of time before they capture the man.

West said, "He's going to make a mistake one night, and we are going to be there."

However, as the still unidentified peeping tom continued to hit houses on Jahncke Avenue that weekend, police said one of the street's female residents had a close encounter of the third kind.

The man went to the woman's door, knocked and called her name several times, West said. This was the third time he went to this particular residence.

Despite the confirmed sightings and the speedy calls to the police, there have still been some technical delays that have restricted the response time of law enforcement.

These delays are from cellular phone calls that have the potential to bounce all over the parish to various cell towers and can seriously delay the police response, West said.

When someone calls from a cell phone and a cell tower somewhere far from the actual incident picks it up, those local law enforcement agencies can sometimes intercept it and dispatch to the wrong location.

If that happens the call then has another sequence of transfers to go through before it can get to the correct agency, West said.

By that time it is most often too late to respond.

To combat this problem, West said citizens who spot the assailant should call 911 on a landline. Local authorities will then pick it up and dispatch to those locations.

The Covington peeping tom has plagued the area between Jefferson Street and Jahncke Avenue on and off for the past year and has thus far alluded capture because of his knowledge of the area.