Police were searching for a man suspected of impersonating an officer and fondling at least two women – one at gunpoint – in the Hollywood area, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
"He is armed. He did sexually assault two women. We don't want this to escalate," Mike Lopez of the LAPD said.
Police said the alleged attacks happened around midnight.
On Nov. 24, a man walked up to a woman in the 6100 block of De Longpre Avenue in LA and as she searched for her keys, he flashed a badge and ID.
"She gave a bag of chips to a homeless man," said a friend of the woman assaulted, who did not want to be identified.
"When she was walking through the driveway, he told her he was a police officer and he thought she gave the homeless man drugs. And that’s when he needed to search her."
He told the victim, identified only as a 25-year-old Russian exchange student attending UCLA, to get up against a wall.
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He then fondled her breasts and butt.
"After a while it got weird the way he was touching," the family friend said. "She told him she wanted to call the owners of the house that’s when he took out a gun and told her he would shoot."
He pulled out a gun from his waistband and told the victim if she screamed, he would shoot her.
He then fled, officials said.
A surveillance camera outside of the home caught the alleged assault on video.
In the second incident on Monday, the man followed a woman to a parking area of an apartment complex in the 500 block of Kingsley Drive.
The man placed a badge on the woman’s window and told her that her registration expired, police said.
He told the woman he needed to search her trunk for weapons and had her open it. He told the woman he needed to pat her down and began to fondle her thighs and butt.
The LAPD described the man as black, with black hair and brown eyes, with a tattoo or birthmark on his left temple.
Police also said the gun was a blue steel semi-automatic handgun.
The man may have fled the first encounter in a black Ford Mustang. In the second encounter, he may have fled in a purple Cadillac.
Police asked anyone with information on the incidents to call the LAPD at 213-473-0447.
