A homeless man, Kenneth Kenji Stine, 50, ended up in jail on Tuesday, although it wasn’t for reportedly chasing a UC Berkeley student into her apartment.
His arrest came after police located him with an active, unrelated warrant, which occurred days after he had been questioned and then released due to a lack of evidence in the case involving student Eden Winograd.
Currently, Stine is in custody because of that outstanding warrant while authorities deliberate on whether his peculiar incident with Winograd justifies fresh charges.
This latest development follows Winograd sharing surveillance footage of the encounter from September 15, which quickly garnered over 2 million views on TikTok.
She recounted that while she was out walking her dog around 8 p.m., Stine ran towards her. Distressed, she hurried back to her off-campus residence, but he allegedly trailed her closely and climbed over the security gate moments after she got inside.
“My heart sank. I was out of breath,” Winograd said, expressing her distress about being pursued and watching someone scale a wall to enter where she lived.
Ultimately, she managed to escape into an elevator and reach her apartment safely.
It took police more than an hour to respond to the situation, citing their involvement in other urgent matters, which included a missing autistic child and a domestic violence incident.
The following evening, Winograd recognized Stine sleeping nearby and called the authorities again.
Though officers detained him and gathered information, they released him afterward, treating the incident as misdemeanor trespassing, which stirred quite a bit of online outrage.
Annoyed by the lack of action, Winograd shared edited footage on TikTok, which included a slow-mo segment showing Stine allegedly retrieving something from his pocket.
While investigators confirmed Stine had run towards Winograd before entering the building, they couldn’t definitively state that he was chasing her.
“You guys don’t do anything until it’s too late,” she remarked. “This happens too often to too many people.”
Stine maintains a rather unusual online presence as well. He has expressed thoughts on Facebook about “hearing voices in my head continuously,” attributing it to what he claims is a covert DARPA program that can read and transmit people’s thoughts. In another video on YouTube, he even refers to himself as “God,” adding another layer of peculiarity to his online persona as the incident gained traction.
On September 22, Berkeley police found him again and discovered the existing warrant, allowing them to apprehend him properly.
As of now, Stine faces no new charges related to stalking or trespassing concerning Winograd and will remain in custody while the District Attorney’s Office in Alameda County considers whether to bring additional charges associated with the incident outside her apartment.
