LAFAYETTE COUNTY, Miss. — An Ole Miss student said she was violated when she caught her next door neighbor peeking through her window.
“I want him to pay for what he did,” Sarah Nichols said exclusively to WREG.
Nichols was still coming to grips with the reality of a real life nightmare on Tuesday.
“I felt scared because I didn’t have a weapon. I didn’t have any mace,” she said.
The University of Mississippi senior felt defenseless when Lafayette County Sheriff’s deputies said the man was peeking through her window earlier this month.
“That’s nasty. That’s just perverted,” Frederica Russell, a neighbor, told WREG.
John Michael McMahon lives beside the victim at the Chickasaw Apartments where Nichols said it was her cat who spotted him.
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“She sees something outside she doesn’t like, she’ll growl. She started growling and hid behind the hot water heater,” Nichols explained. “I cut off all the lights. I wrapped a towel around me and then I got the flashlight on my phone. I went to go looking outside. I didn’t see anyone out the front window.”
Deputies said McMahon was lying on the ground in the back of the apartment building.
“The person just so happened to hop back in their back window,” the Ole Miss music education major said.
Nichols reported the crime on Labor Day weekend, but McMahon was not arrested until late last week.
“If you’re policemen and women, or if you’re our justice system, how long does it take to do something like this?” she asked.
“You took something from her. You didn’t give her an opportunity to even invite you to see her in that form,” Russell said.
The suspect was released from jail on bond and is living next door to the victim again.
McMahon is not expected back in court until next year.
