A Queensland mother has expressed relief and gratitude after a neighbour she had never met stepped in to confront an alleged peeping tom accused of watching her teenage daughter through a bedroom window.
Chad Hillier, who lives in Meridan Plains on the Sunshine Coast, rushed into action last Wednesday night after his partner, Demi Irwin, noticed a hooded man standing outside the bedroom window of the home next door.
Inside the room, a teenage girl was playing computer games, unaware that a man was allegedly standing just metres away and looking in.
“She was just innocently on her computer, like being a kid, and to think of her looking up at him standing there doing what he was doing, it’s really quite disturbing,” Ms Irwin told A Current Affair on Monday.
Ms Irwin immediately alerted Mr Hillier, who quickly got dressed and ran outside in an effort to catch the man.
“Demi said, ‘he’s moving babe, he’s moving’, so that’s when I knew I had to go quick,” Mr Hillier recalled.
“I’ve sprinted as fast as I could straight at this fence here and then half jumped over it and I thought he was already going to be gone because he heard the noise.
“I shone the torch straight down there and I saw him hiding behind the air conditioner unit.”
Demi Irwin and Chad Hillier leapt into action after spotting a hooded man outside their neighbour’s bedroom window last Wednesday night
The girl was playing games on her computer, unaware of the man standing metres away
The man then tried to flee by jumping the fence into Mr Hillier’s backyard.
‘He’s tried to get out of the gate but he’s come back, tripped, and fell over,’ he said.
Dressed in only a pair of shorts, Mr Hillier performed a citizen’s arrest, which his partner captured on her phone.
‘The f*** you doing c***… stay there… stay down,’ he said before yelling for Ms Irwin to phone the police.
He detained the man until police arrived and posed for a photo pinning the alleged prowler to the ground with one hand while kissing the knuckles of the other.
Mr Hillier also offered some man-to-man advice.
‘I said to him, “This is your chance to change,'” he recalled.
‘I said, “look what you’ve done mate, pull your head in.”’
Chad Hillier shared some advice with the alleged peeping tom
The man, pictured being escorted from the scene by police, was later charged with two counts of trespass and one count of observations in breach of privacy
A later video showed the girl’s shocked mother watching on as the alleged prowler in handcuffs was escorted by police to a paddy wagon.
The teenage girl remains shaken by the alleged incident.
‘It’s terrifying and it makes me so angry and sick that I had no idea that the man was there,’ her mother said.
‘It just boggles my mind – what was he even doing there?
‘What is there to look at? She’s a little girl.’
Police previously confirmed to Daily Mail that a 30-year-old man was charged with two counts of trespass and one count of observations in breach of privacy.
He will appear in Caloundra Magistrates Court on July 30.
Mr Hillier has since used his partner’s swimwear label to launch a range of T-shirts bearing the slogans ‘No more Peeping Toms’ and ‘Not on my Neighbourhood Watch’, along with the words ‘Citizen Vigilante’ written on the back.
He has been hailed online as an Australian hero by social media users.
‘I would like to think that any other good man would have done the same thing,’ Mr Hillier said.
