Montgomery County police are advising older residents to lock down their homes after a Chevy Chase couple in their 70s were tied up and robbed early Wednesday morning, a home invasion police believe may be linked to four others in the past eight months.
The couple, who live on the 5800 block of Brookside Drive in the upper-class Kensington neighborhood, were awakened around 2:30 a.m. by a man between 20 and 30 years old, 5 feet 8 inches tall and about 150 pounds, Montgomery County police said. The man, who was carrying a handgun, tied them up and demanded valuables. He spent aboutan hour rummaging through the house, at one point striking the female victim, and fled with an unknown number of items. The woman’s injuries were reported as minor.
The couple called police around 5:40 a.m. after they wriggled loose from their bindings, and police said they searched the area for the masked gunman but were not successful in tracking him down.
The culprit’s description, the way the victims were restrained and the targeting of elderly victims, have police believing Wednesday’s home invasion is linked to four others, a police spokeswoman said.
In most cases, the victims are able to alert police within hours of the attack, although one 78-year-old woman was left tied up for two days in her Potomac home after the assailant fled on Feb. 27. That case stands out as the only one in which the suspect approached his victim while she was outside in broad daylight.
In the three other cases, the man tied up his victims after breaking into their homes either late at night or early in the morning. In the first two attacks — one in September in Bethesda, another in November in Chevy Chase — he blew the fuses in the basements and tied up his elderly victims when they came downstairs to check.
On Jan. 9, he did not touch the circuit breaker in the home on the 2300 block of 49th Street Northwest in D.C., but did tie up an 84-year-old man and an 85-year-old woman before taking an undisclosed amount of property.
Anyone with information should call Montgomery police at 240-773-5100.
