Teen Testifies About Home Invasion Assault; Defendant Linked to Pattern Targeting Family, Police Say

TOWSON — A teenage girl testified Wednesday about the night a stranger entered her Nottingham home while she slept, bound her with duct tape, and assaulted her.

The defendant in the attack, Albert Antonio Jones Jr., is also suspected in a series of unsettling incidents involving the girl’s family in the weeks surrounding the attack, police said.

The Baltimore County Courtroom Observer is not naming the victim or her relatives to protect her identity.

Police arrested Jones in Baltimore City three months after the home invasion, according to records. He was driving a stolen car belonging to the girl’s grandmother, according to charging documents. Inside the vehicle, officers found handcuffs, mace, gloves, a security-style badge, and a knit hat emblazoned with the word “POLICE.”

Jones, 44, worked for the Baltimore City Housing Authority and is not a law enforcement officer, according to charging documents.

He is charged in Baltimore County with rape, sexual assault, home invasion, assault, burglary, and theft.

Detectives say cell-site data, surveillance footage, online search history, and the stolen-vehicle case tie him to the Glen Way break-in. They believe he was deliberately targeting the family, though his motive is unclear.

“It’s all coincidental. It’s all circumstantial. There’s nothing concrete—especially to convict Mr. Jones of these hideous offenses,” defense attorney Robert Smith told jurors Wednesday. Smith said police relied on cell-tower data to place Jones near the scene but have no physical evidence proving he was inside the apartment.

The girl was 13 the night of the assault and is now 15. She recounted the night two years earlier when she was home alone at the Dunfield Townhomes on Glen Way, recovering from the flu. Her father had gone to her grandmother’s house for the night. She stayed home, she said, with the doors locked and their four dogs inside.

Near dawn on Nov. 19, 2023, she woke to a man dressed in black, his face obscured, shining a flashlight in her eyes and demanding to know “where the weed was at.” She told police he also asked where “the guy with the dreads” was.

She testified the man struck her several times, splitting her eyebrow. After searching the home, he returned and forced her to undress, put a pillowcase over her head, and bound her hands and legs with duct tape.

“I was scared,” she said. “I didn’t know what was going on. I had an idea, but I didn’t really want to think about that.”

She said she could not see what he was doing, but felt his gloved hand fondling her privates. He asked if she was a virgin. She resisted him, she said, and he eventually left her kneeling in the bathroom. After waiting until she believed he was gone, she went for help.

Under cross-examination, she told Jones’s attorney she never picked him out of a photo lineup and would not be able to identify her attacker because she never saw his face clearly. The suspect was not captured on the front door Ring camera.

When her father learned of the assault, he rushed to reach her—but was delayed by a flat tire that took about ten minutes to change, he said.

After hearing his daughter describe the man, her father said he immediately thought of a strange incident captured on his Ring camera weeks earlier.

“From the description my daughter gave me, that just clicked in my head—from the Ring camera,” he testified.

Her father told jurors he does not know Jones.

On Sept. 30, 2023, his home security camera recorded a large bearded man peering into his house. He did not report it at the time, he said, thinking the man might have been looking at his dogs.

Around the same time, the girl’s grandmother suspected someone had entered her apartment while she wasn’t home. When she returned home from work one night, her cat didn’t greet her as usual. She found the cat shut in her bedroom where she normally keeps the door closed to keep it out. She also found a framed photo on the floor. She reported it to the leasing office but did not file a police report.

Then, on Dec. 9, her Chevy Malibu was stolen from outside her home on Waller Avenue. Surveillance video showed a stocky man entering the car using a key fob, she said.

After the home invasion, detectives canvassed the neighborhood and found a neighbor’s security camera that captured a stocky black male wearing gloves walking through the area at 4:01 a.m. and 5:25 a.m. on Nov. 19—roughly 90 minutes before the attack, according to charging documents.

Investigators later found that a phone associated with Jones connected to towers in the area during both the Sept. 30 suspicious activity and the Nov. 19 home invasion. They also discovered Jones had searched online for interior layouts of the Dunfield Townhomes in late September and early October, and had researched help for operating GPS trackers in the hours before the assault, according to court documents.