OAKLAND — The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office charged a Fairfield man Thursday with attempted sexual assault after an attack on an East Oakland store worker, authorities said.
According to an Oakland police officer’s probable-cause declaration obtained Thursday from the District Attorney’s Office, a man walked into a market just before 9:30 a.m. Jan. 19 in the 4700 block of International Boulevard.
After walking to the rear of the store, the man approached a worker and grabbed her hands before trying to pull her toward him. The worker managed to get loose and run to a door, but the man followed her. When she fell to the ground, the man managed to grab her leg and pull her pants down.
After the worker fought back, pushing him off her and pulling her pants back up, the man turned and ran westbound out of the store along International Boulevard toward High Street. The worker reported the attack to the police, who responded and obtained surveillance footage from the market’s cameras.
Soon after, officers realized that the man seen in the footage was the same one officers had seen twenty minutes earlier in a separate response to a shelter in the 4800 block of International Boulevard. In that incident, a man had locked himself inside a bathroom and refused to come out, but later exited and identified himself by his first name to police.
Investigators issued a community alert describing the man and asking residents to call the department’s special victims unit if they saw him. Just before 8 p.m. Sunday, BART police responded to reports of a sexual battery at Lake Merritt BART station, and found and detained a suspect who did not have entry fare and resisted officers’ efforts to take him into custody. After arresting the man on suspicion of resisting police, as well as on a pair of outstanding warrants, officers learned Oakland police were seeking him.
The man, identified as Giovanni Redmon, 33, was booked into Santa Rita Jail on Monday and held on at least $15,000 bail. While in custody this week, officers arrested him on suspicion of battery and assault. Redmon faces arraignment Friday at Dublin’s East County Hall of Justice, according to a county records check Thursday night.
According to BART police logs, officers arrested him twice in April 2019, once at Richmond BART station when an off-duty San Francisco police officer helped BART officers subdue and take him into custody on suspicion of resisting arrest during a probation check, and at Lake Merritt BART where he was arrested in connection with $60,000 worth of outside warrants.
After he was detained in May 2021 at Powell BART station in San Francisco on suspicion of fare evasion, he was arrested on $18,000 of warrants from Oakland, Fremont and Pleasant Hill police departments and booked into San Francisco county jail.
He received a BART stay-away order after a June 2021 detention at Union City’s BART station on suspicion of fare evasion led to his arrest on suspicion of brandishing a weapon and resisting arrest and booked into Santa Rita Jail.
Contact George Kelly at 408-859-5180.
