Courts. (Credit: Flickr/Creative Commons)
Paul Tyrone Owens, of Schwenksville, told authorities and the female victim he was looking for his keys when he put his head under an occupied dressing room door
A Schwenksville man convicted by a jury of being a peeping tom at the King of Prussia Mall was sentenced to probation and sex offender registration for his misdemeanor crime by Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Risa Vetri Ferman.
Paul Tyrone Owens, 34, of Graterford Road, was convicted by jury on an invasion of privacy charge for peering into a dressing room stall to watch a nude adult woman at Pacsun at the Upper Merion Township store, according to court documents.
Ferman, who presided over the trial, also sentenced Owens to stay away from the mall and the victim, and to undergo a psychosexual evaluation, per the report.
Owens faces a requirement to report his address to state police for 15 years as part of Megan’s Law compliance.
Authorities said Upper Merion Police responded to the store on April 30, 2024 for a report of suspicious activity inside the store.
A 25-year-old victim reported she saw Owens looking at her as she shopped for a bathing suit. When she went into the dressing room, she undressed completely, only to look down and see Owens looking up at her from an opening under the fitting room door, police said.
“The (woman) saw the male’s arm extended into her dressing room, he had a cellphone in his hand, and the cellphone was pointed at her,” detectives said in an affidavit. “(The woman) believed the male had taken pictures or video of her.”
When she confronted Owens, he told her he dropped his keys and then quickly ran out of the store, police said.
An employee saw Owens in the store, took a photo of him, and gave it to mall security guards, who recognized Owens from repeated complaints, police said. Mall patrons had reported Owens to security in the past for alleged lewd activities that made them uncomfortable, according to the report.
Owens then returned to the mall the same day, where the victim identified him to police, according to the complaint.
According to The Mercury, Owens told police he thought he had dropped his keys and denied looking under the door into the dressing room; he admitted to holding the phone.
While detectives found no images of the woman on Owens’s phone, they did find images of bare buttocks in the camera roll, according to court records.
Investigators also believed there were images deleted from the cellphone based on the date range displayed.
Upon additional questioning, Owens eventually told detectives that as he looked for his dropped keys, he got down on his hands and knees, lowered his head in order to look under the dressing room door, looked upward in order to see the woman who was in a state of full nudity and specifically saw her back and bare buttocks, according to the arrest affidavit.
Owens denied taking photos of the woman, per the report, but later admitted to following attractive women at the mall.
All suspects and defendants are innocent until proven guilty. This story was compiled using public court records.
