Man tampers with music festival port-a-potty to assault woman inside, Calif. cops say
A woman was using a portable restroom Saturday at BottleRock Music Festival in California when a man reached inside, assaulting and inappropriately touching her, police said.
The woman called 911 around 10 p.m., but police officers who responded to the Napa Valley Expo grounds restrooms couldn’t immediately find a suspect, though they did discover “the wall of the portable restroom had been compromised which allowed the offender to reach into the interior of the restroom,” Napa police said Monday in a news release.
When police and BottleRock security officers looked for signs that other bathrooms had been compromised, they found several that had been tampered with, police said.
Napa County deputies and the District Attorney’s Office began investigating as well, combing through security camera footage to figure out who was behind the toilet tampering, police said.
Police met with festival planners to create a safety plan for the next — and final — day of the festival. That included replacing or fixing the compromised bathrooms and beefing up security.
It paid off the next day, police said.
A BottleRock staffer monitoring the bank of portable restrooms around 9:20 p.m. Sunday spotted a man acting suspiciously behind one of the portables, police said.
“The staff member confronted the man and stayed with him until Napa Police Officers arrived,” police said.
Police identified the suspect as Peterson William Fontes, a 42-year-old Richmond man.
“The area where Fontes was seen was checked and a portable restroom was located that had been compromised in a manner consistent with the incident on May 25th,” police said.
Fontes was arrested, taken to the Napa Police Department for an interview and then jailed, according to police. He faces charges of felony penetration by a foreign object, felony vandalism, burglary and misdemeanor peeking while loitering.
Anyone with information relevant to the case — or who witnessed suspicious behavior that might be related — should contact Napa police at (707) 257-9592 or bkeown@cityofnapa.org.
“The safety and security of all BottleRock attendees is our top priority,” police said.
The festival drew more than 120,000 fans to Napa Valley over Memorial Day weekend with “lavish food and wine offerings, madcap celebrity chef demos and plenty of VIP perks,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Neil Young, Pharrell Williams, Santana, Logic, Mumford & Sons, Imagine Dragons and dozens of other musical acts performed during the three-day event.
This story was originally published May 28, 2019 at 3:07 PM with the headline "Man tampers with music festival port-a-potty to assault woman inside, Calif. cops say."