Ruthie Arnold is worried about the security of her home.

“We’re not safe here,” Arnold, a resident of the Aeolian Apartments at 1300 Cherry St., said. “We’re supposed to be a safe environment, but we’re not.”

Arnold’s concern for her safety is the result of an Aug. 16 incident when she was attacked in her second-floor apartment by a woman who was not a resident of the building.

“That gal just broke in,” Arnold said. “Bam! That lady comes barreling in that door and I didn’t know who she was; she didn’t belong in this building. I got bruises from the way she came in and attacked me.

“She got to fighting with me and I finally got her down and drug her back out of my apartment and then she got up and she ran past me, telling me she’s going to kill me and all this junk,” Arnold said. “She was a little tiny girl and she was throwing me around like I was a rag doll.”

Arnold said the woman ran past the apartment’s security guard, who body-slammed her and then threw the woman into a wall to slow her down.

“She was drugged up as Hogan’s goat and he couldn’t do a thing with her. It hadn’t even fazed her,” Arnold said.

When police arrived, Arnold said, they gave the names of three drugs they believed the woman took. She said officers and paramedics had trouble getting her attacker in the ambulance and to a hospital.

“She would take her head and she would just butt against the concrete wall,” she said.

Security Weaknesses

Arnold and her friend Carol Venturella said the incident and other security problems are a cause for concern. They point to problems with the automatic door for the apartment’s underground parking garage and the building’s entrances that are sometimes left open. The women said no one has determined how Arnold’s assailant got in.

Attempts to contact the on-site manager at the Aeolian or someone at Cory, Texas-based Brownstone Residential LLC, which manages the property, were unsuccessful. A call to the on-site manager was answered by a recording saying the voicemail box was full.

Venturella said management ordered the parking garage cleared and manually closed and locked its door after Arnold was attacked. She said if someone were able to enter through the garage, the person could access the apartments through the building’s patio area or use its elevators.

“The front door stands open (facing Clay Street) and the side door on the Cherry Street side, somebody will take anything they can get and put in there or put the rug to where it leaves the door open and anybody off the street can come in,” Arnold said.

“You see strange people here all the time,” Venturella said.

When a new resident moves into the Aeolian, Arnold said, the building’s management should have a meeting “and bring us all in and say, ‘Here’s our new person in the building,’ so we can all get to know that person. Then if we see somebody in the building who doesn’t belong in the building, we can question it.

“But that doesn’t happen here and we’re always saying, ‘Do you know this person? Does this person belong here?'” she added. “We got people; we got drug dealers that dress up in scrubs and come in here and sell their dope. The man that lived next door to me, he got evicted for that.

“We complain and complain but they don’t do anything,” Arnold said.