Opinion ID: 844257
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Burglary and Assault on Colleen Cliff

Text: On October 1, 1992, Colleen Cliff was sleeping in a guest room at the home of friends in Riverside. Ms. Cliff awoke with a man straddling her and holding a knife to her throat. When she screamed, he told her to shut up or he would kill her. He asked who else was in the house. When she named her host, the intruder apologized and said he had made a terrible mistake. He claimed he was a hit man and was in the wrong house. He led Ms. Cliff to the kitchen, where he returned the knife to a drawer. Threatening to come back and kill her if she called police, he ran out the door. Ms. Cliff testified that her assailant was six feet tall and slender. Defendant was five feet 11 inches tall and weighed 150 pounds. Although Ms. Cliff's assailant was wearing a ski mask, she could see the skin around his mouth, which she described as that of a Black man with a light skin tone. She testified that defendant's skin tone was [e]xactly as I remember. Ms. Cliff's assailant was dressed in all black, including a turtleneck sweater. According to defendant's coworkers at the movie theater, he sometimes dressed entirely in black. Yolanda Narez testified that once after work defendant changed into a black outfit he had in his backpack. On another occasion Matthew Shreiner saw defendant dressed in his ninja garb, all black with a ninja mask revealing only his eyes. Stephanie Compton's car was parked in front of defendant's house. In the trunk the police found a laundry bag containing a black turtleneck and a navy blue knit cap with eye and mouth holes cut into it.