By Steve Watkins, ADVANCE EDITOR
Mary Camuso’s daughter is hoping she can ride the bus to and from Hugh Mercer Elementary School when classes start this Wednesday. All her Lafayette Boulevard neighborhood friends will be riding, and she wants to be with them.
She also wants to make sure her mother will walk her to the bus stop, and be standing there waiting when she returns in the afternoon.
The last time Camuso’s daughter rode the bus home, ten days before school ended back in May, her middle-school brother was the one who met her. A middle-school girl was at the bus stop as well, waiting for her sister so the two older kids could walk the younger ones home a few blocks away.
What the two elementary school girls didn’t know as they stepped off the bus that day was that a strange man in a full-body-and-head Pink Panther costume was staring at them from the other side of Lafayette Boulevard.
As soon as the bus left, the man crossed the road toward the children. He wore calf-length boots, an open red flannel shirt over his costume, and a fabric bag hanging from a strap around his neck.
Camuso’s son and the middle-school girl were alarmed—they’d seen the man while they waited—and they told the two younger girls to run.
“My daughter said she didn’t know why she was running,” Camuso recalled in an interview this week. “And then she looked behind her and saw why they were running. It was because that creepy guy was chasing them. He reached out and tried to grab the little one that was the furthest behind because she was slower. Her older sister had her arm and pulled her away from him and that’s why he didn’t get her.”
Camuso said the man chased the children through a church parking lot, and might have continued but a car approached them on side street. “My son thinks that that car scared him away, because [the man in the costume] then started running in the opposite direction,” Camuso said.
Neighbors reported hearing the children screaming.
As soon as the children got home and were able to say what had happened, Camuso and the other children’s mother jumped in a car and went looking for the man. No one they spoke to had seen him since the incident at the bus stop, but numerous people said they’d spotted him—and many had filmed him—before then: passersby in cars as he walked down the side of the road, workers and shoppers at a nearby Family Dollar Store, the manager and shoppers at the D Mart on Lafayette Boulevard where the man had attempted to buy wine but refused to remove his headpiece.
“One girl who was in Paul’s Bakery said he walked up to her car and acted like he was going to open the door, but her dog went off on him,” Camuso said. “A lot of people have been, like, ‘Oh, it must be a mental health thing,’ but when she looked for him in the Paul’s parking lot, which is pretty open, he just vanished into thin air. She said with how fast he escaped, she felt like he was very aware and knew what he was doing.”
Witnesses said the man never spoke, and the children reported that as well. There was a small hole in the man’s mask, and some witnesses said they were able to see that the man had a tan complexion and some facial hair.
Camuso said she called Fredericksburg Police that same afternoon—4:30 on Thursday, May 16—to report the incident. No police came to her house, however, and she said she wasn’t contacted again until 10:20 Friday night by police who told her they wanted to take down an “official” report. The following morning, Saturday, May 18, a detective, Melanie Boyle, was assigned to the case, and Camuso and the other children’s mother went to the police station for interviews.
“[Detective Boyle] said she didn’t understand why everything unfolded the way it did, but they were going to do an investigation as to why there was no official report made on the initial call,” Camuso said. “She said she did some canvasing of the neighborhood, asked around, checked cameras, increased police presence for the end of the school year, especially around that bus stop. Other than that, it’s been very limited. I’ve checked a few times to see if we had any leads. In our first interview, it was pretty much stated that this is going to be a hard case to crack because his identity is concealed.”
Camuso, a real-estate appraiser, said she’s had to contact police three or four times over the past few months when people sent her what turned out to be AI-generated videos, some of them “pretty extensive, like a news report,” of a man in a Pink Panther costume being arrested.
“And every time it’s been somebody made some fake video,” she said.
“There was another realtor in town that put out a [fake] post hanging out with [the man in the Pink Panther costume] in Disney World,” Camuso said. “My friend saw it and was like ‘Hey, that’s in really bad taste. Maybe you’re not hearing, you’re not understanding the gravity of this, but that thing chased children. What if that was your kids? How would you feel about that?”
The fake videos have continued, Camuso said. The last “arrest” someone sent her, which she forwarded to Detective Boyle, was a week and a half ago.
Fredericksburg City Police wouldn’t make Detective Boyle available for an interview or answer any questions about the case, except to say that was still an ongoing investigation.
The incident has changed them as a family, Camuso said, and has affected her as a parent.
“I felt like my son was responsible enough to go to the bus stop to pick up his sister,” she said. “I thought we were at a stage where I could let go of some of those helicopter mom tendencies. I’m a very involved parent, and I just started letting go, but it made me realize that just because I trust my child doesn’t mean I can trust the world.”
Camuso says after nearly three months she doubts police will be able to identify the man in the Pink Panther costume—not unless he shows back up and something else happens.
“I wish there was a way that I could get him arrested, or he be gone, for the sanity of my daughter,” Camuso said. “I think she would be less anxious if he were arrested, and they didn’t have to worry about him. They still talk about him. They call him the Pink Panther guy, and if they see, like, a pink monkey or a pink panther doll or anything, it bothers them. I would say it’s triggering.”
Camuso said her daughter is still traumatized by what happened. “She didn’t want to go near the bus stop,” Camuso said. “And at first she didn’t even want to come back to the house. She won’t go to her room inside the house without me accompanying her. All the lights have to be on all the time. She doesn’t want to go outside and play.”
Camuso said she arranged for her daughter to have lunches with the school counselor during the last several days of the school year. She also scheduled an emergency session with her daughter’s therapist, and increased her daughter’s therapy sessions.
“We did private interviews with the child advocacy center,” Camuso added. “And the detective sat down with her, and I had [the detective] explain everything she’s doing to find the guy to try to make [my daughter] feel more safe.”
She said her son doesn’t seem fazed by the incident, and she’s proud of the way he protected his sister. “He’s back,” she said. “He’s like, ‘Oh, you’re going to let me pick up [his sister] from the but stop? He’s ready to be up there alone again, and he wants to walk alone. I’m like ‘Oh, I don’t know if that’s happening.”
Camuso said she worries more about her daughter. “I think it’s going to be a core memory that sticks with her, you know?”
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Steve Watkins is editor of The Advance.
Why does the photograph at the end of this article have identifying information telling us the location and date of the image?