Prosecutors: public masturbator to cops ‘It’s fun, until I get caught’

In the pre-dawn hours on Sept. 23, a woman walked from her Galewood house to her car when she saw it: a man, naked except for his shoes and socks, masturbating in the glow of the streetlamp on the corner of North Melvina Avenue and Wabansia.

She ran to the car and called police.

Five days later, the woman again was walking to her car in the early morning hours, this time with her 8-year-old daughter. Stripped to his feet and gazing at mother and child, the man stood, masturbating on the same corner, Cook County prosecutors said. The woman and her daughter hurried to the car as the man came toward them. Before they could speed away, he stood beside the girl at the passenger window, still pleasuring himself, prosecutors said.

On Wednesday, the woman peered out of her windows before leaving the house and spied the man again, nude but for his shoes, facing her house and allegedly masturbating. Again, the woman called police. This time, officers arrived in time. After a short foot chase, the woman’s tormentor – 30-year-old Calvin Pitchford – was arrested, authorities said.

“It’s fun, until I get caught,” Pitchford told police, Assistant State’s Attorney Nancee Hofheimer said Friday at his bond hearing at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse.

It was not the first time Pitchford had been caught, Hofheimer said, noting prior convictions for public indecency and aggravated assault and battery in 2006 and 2007. In the 2007 case, Pitchford was sentenced to 300 days in jail, after he was convicted of approaching a 21-year-old woman and threatening her with a knife, then pulling his penis out of his pants and masturbating as he followed her down the sidewalk.

A year earlier, Pitchford had received probation for public indecency, after he was convicted of masturbating as he stared through a restaurant window at a 17-year-old woman, his shorts at his ankles.

In the latest incident, Pitchford faces charges of sexual exploitation of a child and three counts of public indecency.

Judge Sophia Atcherson ordered him to post $5,000 bail and wear a GPS monitoring bracelet.