Burnsville Man Charged with Window-Peeping in Lakeville

A Burnsville man has been charged with peeping in the bedroom window of a Lakeville home while he was supposed to be delivering telephone books.

Christopher Charles Myer, 38, is charged with a gross misdemeanor count of interfering with privacy by peeping in a window, which carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a $3,000 fine.

He’s also charged with having expired license plates on the pickup truck he was using to deliver phone books.

According to the criminal complaint, a Lakeville woman called police just after 8:30 a.m. May 13 to report a suspicious male peeping through her bedroom window.

The woman told police that she had been lying in bed with her young son when she saw a man watching her through the window. She said that when the man realized she had seen him, he began running east on Lower 161st Street.

The victim described the suspect as a heavyset, middle-aged man with brown hair, wearing a shirt with some white on it, and told police that he had been standing between a large bush and the house, with his face “right up against the window,” according to the complaint.

The woman told police that she “felt violated” by the incident.

The officer checked the area and spotted a man, later identified as Myer, delivering Frontier phone books from a pickup truck with expired license plates. He stopped the truck, and Myer told him that he was delivering phone books and was walking in homeowners’ yards, but that he wasn’t peeping in windows, according to the complaint.

Myer told the officer that he had a GPS unit given to him by Frontier that would show exactly where he had been. The officer told Myer that although no phone books had been delivered on the block where the peeping incident occurred, Myer had been seen on that block.

Myer told the officer that his delivery method was to walk up to a home’s front door, click a button on the GPS to show Frontier that he was dropping off the book, then come back to actually deliver the book to the front door.

The officer noted that all the phone books delivered in the neighborhood had been dropped off in driveways near the street, not at front doors.

Police contacted a representative from Directory Distribution Associates, who told him that the company’s delivery people were supposed to carry the GPS unit only while delivering phone books and click the button when the book was delivered. He said Myer shouldn’t have been walking with the GPS unit when he wasn’t delivering books.

Another officer showed the victim a photo of Myer, and she said she was 90 percent sure that he was the man who had peeped in her bedroom window, according to the complaint.

Myer admitted to police that he “may have been” cutting behind the victim’s bushes and that he “may have” faced her window, but he denied peeping inside. He also admitted that he had been charged in Apple Valley with exposing himself to a woman in a home that he was renting, according to the complaint.

Myer’s criminal history in Minnesota includes convictions for domestic assault, violating protection orders, making terroristic threats and credit-card fraud.

He is scheduled to make a first appearance on the window-peeping charge Aug. 8 in Dakota County District Court in Hastings.