A man hiding in a women's bathroom stall at Boston's Museum of Science grabbed a teenage girl from behind and tried to restrain her this weekend, officials said.
The 15-year-old was able to scream and escape, while her assailant fled, according to the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office.
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The man was identified the next day and arrested a day after that, prosecutors said. Yandri Hernandez, a 24-year-old from Somerville, was ordered held without bail on charges of kidnapping a child, strangulation or suffocation and assault and battery ahead of a dangerousness hearing Friday.
"This is a terrifying incident for anyone, particularly for a teenager simply enjoying an outing with a friend at a popular destination. This young woman's description of her attacker, along with top-notch identification work based on the images disseminated by investigators, led to the defendant being spotted and arrested just days after the incident," District Attorney Kevin Hayden said in a statement.
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Massachusetts State Police began investigating the attempted kidnapping about 12:41 p.m. Sunday, prosecutors said. The girl told investigators that she went into the first-level bathroom while a friend waited outside, and that she felt a hand cover her mouth from behind when she went to wash her hands, which she thought at first was her friend.
Then she saw that it was a man behind her, who didn't speak but tried to restrain her, according to prosecutors, who noted that the girl made it out of the bathroom with a scream.
State police said that after she got out of the women's bathroom, she sought help from staff members, who called police.
A witness who was also inside the bathroom reported that she'd noticed two stalls occupied, and that the person in a stall next to hers had abnormally large black-and-white sneakers on, prosecutors said. She heard the people in the other stalls exit one after the other, followed by muffled screaming and an altercation, but when she left her stall, no one was in the bathroom.
A man with black-and-white had sneakers entered the museum just before 11 a.m., surveillance footage showed, and he sat in a lobby by the bathroom, which he went inside after about an hour. Prosecutors said that investigators shared images of that man to local police, and that Cambridge police reached out Monday to say it was Hernandez, identifying him through a distinctive tattoo on one of his arms.
On Tuesday, Hernandez was seen in Somerville and taken into custody by state police. He was arraigned in Boston Municipal Court, Charlestown, on Wednesday, where Judge Lisa Grant ordered him held without bail; it wasn't immediately clear if Hernandez had an attorney who could speak to the charges.
The Museum of Science shared this statement on what happened: "The Museum of Science takes multiple steps to create a safe environment for our members and guests. We are grateful for the efforts of our own internal public safety team, combined with law enforcement officials, who were able to quickly identify the involved individual."
