Last March on a Sunday night in Broward County, a man stood outside model Gustė Janušauskaitė’s window and watched her sleep. Then the stranger came back again and again — the same day of the week.
Janušauskaitė, a model known on social media as Gustejanus, is finally sharing her terrifying story in a series of viral TikToks.
Janušauskaitė said her mother, who had a gut instinct something wasn’t right, installed cameras at their house one Sunday in March of last year.
“I thought [it] was extra as hell because we live in a gated community in a very safe city,” Janušauskaitė, a recent FSU graduate, said in a TikTok. ”But God bless my mother’s intuition because it definitely saved my life.”
The next day, the mother watched the security footage from the night before and caught a man standing outside her daughter’s window. She called police.
Officers told Janušauskaitė to keep her blinds, windows, and curtains closed at all times, or in her words: to live like a “vampire in order to feel somewhat safe in my own house,” Janušauskaitė, noted in a TikTok.
Janušauskaitė said she arrived home at around 11:10 p.m. that night. By 11:11 p.m., the man was outside her window.
“He knew my schedule,” she said in a TikTok.
She says she listened to their advice, keeping her curtains closed, but took matters into her own hands by adjusting the camera to get a better view of outside her window in addition to creating a booby trap by tying a rope between two trees in an attempt to catch the perpetrator slipping — literally.
The next Sunday it happened, again.
Minutes after she arrived home, she heard the booby trap go off. Her blinds and curtains were closed, as police suggested, so she checked the security footage as she sat on her bed right beside the window. The man was standing on the other side of it.
She ran to her mother’s room and confronted him by banging on the window. The man looked around searching for the security cameras, then slowly walked away.
Police arrived at 3 a.m. She says they told her to be cautious when she left her house and continue closing blinds and curtains, and “once again not helping whatsoever,” she said in a TikTok. Her mother walked around the neighborhood asking neighbors to help identify the man. The gated community in Broward, which she did not disclose the specific location of, also did nothing, she added.
After the confrontation with her stalker, she never saw him again. But the incident still had Janušauskaitė on edge, thinking any noise outside her window could be someone watching her, she told art and pop culture magazine Bored Panda.
“There were a couple of instances where I had panic attacks thinking he came back and I would wake my mom up, but in reality, no one was there after checking our cameras,” she said.
A year after the incident, Janušauskaitė has moved away and is now on the third floor. But she still carries around a pocket knife and pepper spray.
Since her experience went viral on TikTok, another woman reached out to Janušauskaitė saying that she recognized the man from the Ring videos.
The woman said the man had been stalking her own family for three years at their home — just minutes away from where Janušauskaitė used to live. She told her there has been an ongoing investigation into the man, according to Bored Panda.