‘We can’t do anything’: A UC Berkeley student says a man chased her and scaled her gate, then police released him because they didn’t witness it

Eden Winograd, a UC Berkeley junior, says a man approached her while she was walking her dog near her off-campus apartment on Sept. 15, made strange gestures, then sprinted toward her, according to the Daily Mail. Surveillance video shows her running through her building’s locked security gate and pulling it shut, only for the man to climb over it seconds later and follow her inside.

“I don’t want to be chased the second I step out of my apartment,” she told NBC Bay Area. Police took more than an hour to respond to her call that night and couldn’t locate the man; he had reportedly spent the night sleeping in the building’s garage, according to the Berkeley Scanner. Winograd spotted him again the next evening, asleep on a nearby sidewalk, and called police once more.

Officers identified him as 50-year-old Kenneth Kenji Stine, who is unhoused, detained him briefly, then let him go. Stine has not been quoted or reported to have commented on the allegations in any account of this incident. “About two minutes into the conversation, they took the handcuffs off, and came back to me and said, we can’t do anything,” Winograd said. “You guys don’t do anything until it’s too late. This happens too often to too many people.”

The law limited what officers could do, even after identifying him

Berkeley police said the alleged trespassing was a misdemeanor that occurred the night before, outside any officer’s presence, and forwarded the case to the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office instead of arresting him on the spot. Investigators separately said they could establish Stine had run in Winograd’s direction but couldn’t definitively establish that he’d chased her specifically, the outlet reported, a distinct evidentiary gap from the legal question of officer presence.

Public records show Stine has a history that includes a June arrest on UC Berkeley’s campus over an alleged restraining-order violation, a felony arson charge filed in San Mateo County after a Sept. 19 fire at a Menlo Park coffee shop, and a prior felony arson conviction in Contra Costa County. Stine has also posted publicly in the past describing hearing voices, which he attributed to an alleged secret government program; no diagnosis or official assessment of his mental state has been reported.

Under California Penal Code Section 836, an officer generally needs to witness a misdemeanor firsthand, or have it fall under specific carve-outs like domestic violence or protective-order violations, to arrest someone without a warrant. Ordinary trespassing doesn’t fall under those exceptions.

Separately, California law allows a private citizen to make an arrest for a misdemeanor committed in their own presence under Penal Code Section 837, an option available to Winograd herself in the moment, though not to police after the fact.

Stine was booked into jail on Sept. 22 on an unrelated felony warrant out of Contra Costa County for an alleged violation of post-release supervision and is being held without bail on that warrant alone. He has not been charged in connection with the incident involving Winograd, though the Alameda County DA’s office is still reviewing it.

“We deserve stricter laws so that things like this aren’t just allowed to happen legally,” Winograd said.