It was a hideous invasion of privacy and every woman’s nightmare.
A young sales manager stepped out of the shower of her Soho apartment wearing only a towel and got a sickening shock — a cellphone with a red, blinking light had been aimed at her bedroom window, and it was recording her every move.
A month after her haunting find, police are still seeking the construction worker who owns the phone — and who is believed to have propped it up against a bucket on the woman’s fire escape while he worked on the roof of the woman’s Thompson Street co-op, sources told The Post.
“There were some other interesting and weird things in the phone, more than just unauthorized surveillance,” one law-enforcement source said of the cellphone of suspect Edward Garcia, 44, whose last known address is in West New York, NJ.
It was 7:15 in the morning on June 12 when the woman, a 23-year-old professional whose name is being withheld by The Post, had her privacy shattered.
She was getting ready for her job in Midtown and had just showered and wrapped herself in a towel when she saw it — the red blinking light, just outside her bedroom window. “She said she noticed a cellphone, set on top of a bucket on her fire escape,” said a law-enforcement source.
In fear and disgust, she grabbed the phone and hit play, discovering she’d just unwittingly starred in her own steamy, 20-minute skin flick, right in her own $3,000-a-month apartment.
She also found on the phone selfies of a man she recognized as a construction worker who’d been working on her building’s roof.
But in a flash — the time it took her to call 911 and for cops to arrive — the man had left the construction site, never to be seen there again.
“They lined us up and had us take off our hats and check to see if any of us looks like the man in the picture” in the phone, recalled Felipe Anthony, 48.
Anthony worked for another construction company that also had access to the woman’s roof.
“They asked us if we have ever saw this guy running around,” Anthony said. “But he does not work for us.”
Residents at the building told The Post the roofing company Garcia worked for has been fired.
The company was on the roof removing asbestos and doing other repairs, said building superintendent Chris Rivera.
“This gives us a bad name,” said another construction worker at the site, Matt Probst, 34, a laborer with Local 79.
“There are a lot of perverts out there. If we saw him, we would have grabbed him.”