Fearful for her life, an 11-year-old Asian-American girl scrawled ‘help…robbers!!’ on the wall of a bathroom after being locked inside by intruders who had broken into her family’s San Francisco home and stripped it of valuables.
The victim was doing remote-learning on Zoom at her cousin’s home in the Portola district on Friday afternoon when two men forced their way inside.
One of the perpetrators grabbed the child by her shirt and forced her into the bathroom.
The girl was afraid that she would be kidnapped or killed, so she wrote her plea for help on the wall with a pencil, reported KGO-TV. She was not physically harmed.
With the child out of the way, the pair of intruders proceeded to stuff the homeowner’s pillowcases with thousands of dollars worth of American, Chinese and Korean currency that was in the house, along with expensive camera equipment, before making their escape.
The home invasion is being investigated by the San Francisco Police Department’s Burglary Detail.
The owner of the burglarized home said that his troubles that day started hours earlier when he discovered that his car had been broken into while he was tending to the graves of his deceased relatives at a cemetery in Colma.
The robbery comes as the Asian American community nationwide are on edge after a spike in racially motivated attacks in the past year.
It happened less than a week after six Asian women were killed in a mass shooting in Atlanta on Tuesday.
The family says it is “scared these robbers are still out there” but is “remaining strong.”
