A terrified Bronx woman has armed herself with a pair of pit bulls in a desperate attempt to defend herself against an unhinged career criminal who keeps breaking into her home but remains on the streets.
Itesha Hairston, the owner of a beauty salon, is terrified that 33-year-old Jarrell Coburn is stalking her after the vagrant broke into her home three times in less than ten days last month, but he keeps getting off lightly because of a soft-on-crime court system that will not lock him up.
In fact, Coburn, who has at least nine unsealed busts on his record, attempted to break in again on April 9, just nine days after he was apprehended inside her Longwood ground-floor apartment.
“He really thinks this is his apartment,” Hairston, 47, told the Post. “He truly believes he lives here. This guy is extremely dangerous. He simply will not stop. The guy refuses to stop. I have never met this guy before.
“Something is really wrong with this dude,” she told me. “That is why I got my sister’s dogs. The law will do nothing to protect me. I need to be protected somehow.”
Coburn, whose previous arrests include charges of assaulting and spitting on NYPD officers, has five open cases in the Bronx, three of which involve allegedly breaking into Hairston’s apartment.
The woman’s nightmare began on March 21, when she was upstairs in a neighbor’s apartment and heard loud banging from below, prompting her to rush down only to face Coburn, she said.
“So I run downstairs and he runs out of the building,” she told me. “But before he ran out of the building, he pointed a gun at me. So I went back upstairs, he ran out of the building, and I called the cops.”
Coburn returned on March 27, allegedly breaking into Hairston’s home while she was at a friend’s apartment and running her sink until it flooded the boiler room below.
“The landlord came and said, ‘Someone is in your apartment.'” I said, ‘No one’s there. ‘Only you and I have the key. He replied, ‘No, somebody is there.’ I called the police again, and they arrested him that night.”
Coburn was hauled into court and charged with menacing, weapons possession, criminal mischief, and harassment in the March 21 incident, as well as criminal trespassing on March 27.
During the March 28 court proceedings, the Bronx District Attorney’s Office requested that he be held on $5,000 cash bail or $15,000 bond, but the judge released him without bail, according to prosecutors.
Cops never found the alleged weapon used in the first break-in.
Two days later, he was allegedly back at Hairston’s place.
“I unlock my door, and there he is,” she remembered. “He says, ‘Get the f-k out of here!’ “This is my apartment,” he said, slamming the door. He almost cut off my fingers.
“I just ran and I called the cops and they blocked every exit that he could run out of and had to knock the door down to get him and arrest him,” says Hairston.
Back in court on March 31, the judge issued an order of protection but released Coburn without bail, owing to the state’s lenient 2019 criminal justice reforms, which exclude criminal trespassing charges from bail eligibility.
Coburn has not been arrested again, but Hairston claims her nightmare did not end there.
“He tried again [on April 9], but the super had already nailed the window,” she told The Post.
That is when she decided to borrow her sister’s pit bulls, Prince and Seymour, as protection.
“I do not know this dude from nowhere,” she was saying. “Either lock him up or I will move. He is in a position where he could seriously hurt someone. You could rape me if you climb up someone is window and get inside.
“People like him should be locked away and never let out,” Hairston added. “He could do it to anybody and eventually the outcome will be very, very bad.”
Coburn’s public defender attorney could not be reached for comment.