The woman who was attacked after a man broke into her house in Northwest D.C. early Sunday morning was trying to get her assailant to leave, and even offered him food, before he overpowered her, beat her and raped her as her children listened from a hallway, according to the police.
Theodore Tinsley, 26, of no fixed address, was arrested Monday morning — one day after police said he broke into the woman’s home in the 3600 block of 13th Street Northwest, just south of Fort Bunker Hill Park, and attacked her. He has been charged with first-degree sexual abuse.
In charging documents filed in D.C. Superior Court Nov. 5, detectives said the woman told them she awakened to a strange man in her house early Sunday morning and she tried to talk to him to get him to leave.
She asked him whether he was hungry, because he looked homeless, and even offered him a bag of food. As she was guiding him through a bedroom on the first floor to reach the back door, he pulled his pants down, ripped off the woman’s shirt and raped her, according to the charging documents.
At one point during the attack, her two children came downstairs to the hallway outside the bedroom, and she told them to run out of the house to a neighbor’s.
The woman also tried to run away, shattering a window of the front door as she tried to make her escape. But she told police the man grabbed her by her hair and pulled her up the stairs, punching her in the face when she tried to kick him and then raping her again.
The attack ended when the neighbor who had been alerted by the children arrived at the house and the assailant took off, police said.
In an interview at the hospital, the woman told police she “tried to talk her way through the assault,” asking her attacker questions, such as his name and age. She said the man told her his name was Theodore and that he was 26.
A detective ended up recognizing the name and her description of her attacker, according to charging documents.
Police said Tinsley was in the same neighborhood Oct. 30, a few days before the woman was attacked, and allegedly assaulted two police officers who were trying to arrest him on theft charges. When the officers attempted to take him into custody, he became aggressive and began swinging his fists at both of them, striking them both, according to the documents. He was charged with misdemeanor assault on a police officer but later released.
Police said the woman identified Tinsley as her attacker in a photo lineup.
Officers arrested Tinsley the next morning in an alley off 11th Street — about a block away from the woman’s house — hiding behind a brick wall.
Police said Tinsley waived his Miranda rights and told detectives he smoked crack cocaine on the morning of the attack and entered the woman’s house through an unlocked rear window.
He told police he was “having an out-of-body experience and the next thing he knew he was top on of her, all of his clothes were off, and they were having sex,” according to the charging documents.
Tinsley told police he remembered the woman struggling during the attack and he admitted hitting her several times in the face and kicking her in the face.
Tinsley, who told police he was previously diagnosed with schizophrenia, is due in D.C. Superior Court for a preliminary hearing Nov. 8.
