Someone is menacing a quiet Oakland neighborhood by throwing rocks

Early last Wednesday morning, a man walked up to a duplex on a residential, tree-lined block in North Oakland and hurled a cantaloupe-sized rock through the front window, shattering the glass.

The vandal then turned and ran down the sidewalk, according to Ring camera footage shared by the property owner with the Chronicle, leaving residents of the Rockridge-area neighborhood alarmed by what they said marked a recent escalation in an ongoing pattern of similar attacks.

For reasons that are yet unclear, someone has been throwing rocks into homes and car windows in recent weeks along several blocks between Telegraph and Claremont avenues, jarring residents in the quiet neighborhood just west of busy College Avenue, where homes were decorated with pumpkins and skeletons on Wednesday.

A spokesperson for the Oakland Police Department said Wednesday afternoon that the incidents were under investigation, but “no additional information is available at this time.”

The ground-floor window smashed last week remained boarded up with wood planks on Wednesday morning. It was the sixth time since December 2024 that someone had broken a window at the same house with a rock, including three times in September, according to the property owner, who declined to share their name out of fear of retribution.

Around the corner on Vicente Street, two additional houses had boarded-up front windows. Some residents made posters with a photo of the suspected “rock thrower,” posting them on telephone poles around the neighborhood with contact information for an Oakland police officer.

Resident Rachel Budge said she and her husband woke up around 6:15 a.m. on a late September weekend to “an extremely loud crash sound.”

When they walked to their living room, they found a rock the size of a grapefruit on the floor. Tiny shards of glass covered “every inch of our living room,” Budge said, including a couch, blankets and toys belonging to her 8-year-old daughter.

“We were so shocked and confused,” Budge said. “And it was just really scary because had it been 30 minutes or an hour later – our daughter sits right in that window and watches Saturday morning cartoons.”

A broken window is boarded up in North Oakland. (Anna Bauman/The Chronicle)

Budge said she called the police, but no officers responded. Instead, she filed an online police report and posted about the incident on Nextdoor to alert her neighbors.

The social media post had a snowball effect. Messages came flooding in from other residents rattled by eerily similar experiences.

“Everybody had the same story – it was a rock or a brick thrown through a car or a house window, nothing was taken. The person just came up, threw the rock and ran away,” Budge said.

Neighbors believe one man, often seen on camera wearing the same red sweat pants, was responsible for the attacks, but they remain puzzled about the motive driving them.

“There’s no signage in any of our windows. There’s no pattern of who he’s targeting,” Budge said. “None of us have ever seen him before except on our security cameras.”

As the family tried to recover from what felt like a violent invasion of their small home, Budge said they installed security cameras with floodlights and stuck a sign in the yard warning passersby they were being monitored.

A flyer is posted on a telephone pole, with photos of a suspected rock thrower. (Anna Bauman/The Chronicle)

But the safety measures did not have the intended deterrent effect.

Shortly before 8 p.m. on Oct. 6 while putting their daughter to bed, Budge and her husband heard another loud crash. This time, the new security cameras captured a man throwing a rock through the window of their car, which was parked in front of their house.

“There was no doubt in our minds it was the same person,” Budge said.

Camera footage showed that a man wearing the same clothes struck another house and car on the same street the next morning.

Budge said she has since talked to nearly a dozen neighbors with similar experiences. The incidents were apparently clustered in less than a square-mile radius. She said she emailed a police community resource officer and her City Council representative, Zac Unger, who were both responsive to her concerns, she said.

To her knowledge, no one has been arrested, making neighbors feel like “sitting ducks waiting for it to happen again,” Budge said.

This article originally published at ‘Shocked and confused’: Someone is menacing a quiet Oakland neighborhood by throwing rocks.