A lone female baker was inside the famous Georgetown Cupcake shop just blocks from the Potomac River when an unidentified man smashed the front window with a stolen beer keg around 11:30 p.m. Sunday, sending her scrambling away from shattered glass.
Then he left.
“She was absolutely terrified,” said Katherine Berman, who co-owns the shop with her sister, Sophie LaMontagne. “She still is. She is really shaken by this. It causes a lot of psychological damage to you.”
It was graduation weekend in Georgetown, which drew crowds of students and visitors. Berman said the suspect “looked like a student” and may have been drinking heavily, but she rejected the idea it was just a “college prank.”
Before allegedly grabbing the beer keg, the suspect first tried and failed to rip up a metal trash can from the curb, according to Berman. He went around the corner and came back with a keg that was outside a nearby home, she said, citing additional surveillance video recovered by neighboring businesses.
Her employee ran into the back of the shop and hid until the attacker left, but she said she came face-to-face with him before video shows him heaving the keg into the shop.
“He has this like rage, almost like this arrogance to him that, you know, I can do this and I can get away with it,” Berman told Fox News Digital. “And that is not acceptable.”
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The Metropolitan Police Department now says the same man is suspected in other attacks on M Street in the dark.
Investigators have obtained new surveillance images that they say show the night prowler earlier this year, damaging another business around 5 a.m. on April 24.
They released an image showing him cocking back a black object on the sidewalk, with a purple paper bracelet on his left wrist.
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“He’s violent, and I think that, to be honest with you, in our society, we live in a civil society where there’s an expectation for us to respect each other, our property, and clearly he didn’t do any of those things,” Berman told Fox News Digital.
Georgetown Cupcake is a popular local bakery and also reached national acclaim in 2010 as the focus of a three-year Discovery series, “DC Cupcakes.”
The incident comes amid ongoing concerns about vandalism and late-night disorder in parts of Washington, D.C., including Georgetown’s heavily trafficked M Street corridor.
“I think that if anybody knows who this individual is, I just implore you to have the courage to come forward,” Berman said. “We really want to find this individual so that he can be held accountable for his actions.”
MPD is asking anyone who can help identify the suspect or with information on the vandalism to call them at 202-727-9099 or text the tip line at 50411.
There is a reward of $1,000 for information that leads to an indictment.
Georgetown Cupcake, known for its long lines, reopened on Monday, hours after the vandalism.
