DUBLIN — A 25-year-old man received a suspended two-year prison term and five years of probation for breaking into an occupied home in the middle of the night and allegedly attacking a woman as she slept in her bed.
Darwin Perez-Jeromimo pleaded no contest to a residential burglary charged and was formally sentenced to one day in jail. But if he violates probation he’ll be sent to prison for two years, “no questions asked,” according to a transcript of the hearing where his plea deal was finalized.
Perez-Jeromimo allegedly broke into the home on May 4, 2023, at around 3 a.m. The woman testified that she was sleeping in her bed when a naked man attacked her and pinned her down. They wrestled until she was able to fight him off and call police, according to court records.
In another room, a then-14-year-old girl awoke to the sounds of her mother screaming. She spoke out at the June sentencing hearing, saying that her innocence, peace of mind, and sense of security at home were all shattered that day. “Since that day, I have felt stuck in time, forever worried, forever scarred, forever scared, forever changed,” the girl told the defendant. “The pure 14-year-old I once was is gone and she’s not coming back.”
She can’t sleep without lights on, continues therapy, and is scared to walk the streets of her own city, she said. Despite all this, she stood in court and faced Perez-Jeromimo; when Judge Thomas Nixon offered to read her statement for her, she politely declined and finished it herself.
“I hate that I feel this way. I hate that one person’s choice to do something monstrous left a mark so deep that it sometimes colors the way I see strangers who have done nothing to me,” she later added. As for Perez-Jeromimo, she concluded he “does not deserve freedom, not because I want revenge, but because freedom is something that must be earned by those who respect it.”
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In court filings, Perez-Jeromimo’s lawyer argued that a sex assault during burglary charge should be dismissed, saying even the woman told police she wasn’t sure “what he [was] trying to do.” Prosecutors countered that it didn’t take a deep analysis to deduce the motivation of a man who entered a home, stripped nude, and jumped on a naked woman as she slept.
In the end, Perez-Jeromimo pleaded no contest to a simple burglary charge and the sexual assault component was dismissed from the case, court records show.
The woman testified in the August 2025 preliminary hearing that she accidentally left her front door unlocked that day and didn’t realize the mistake until the attack. She testified that she poked the man in the eye and knocked him unconscious.
“I was able to get the best of him and I did strike him in the head a few times where no movement or no consciousness at the time that I was now — I had enough to find my phone and call the police,” she testified.
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