North Philly Horror story

A REAL MONSTER was hiding behind a door Tuesday morning, in the darkened hallway of a North Philly rowhouse.

Police don't know who he is or why he was in the home next to an old, rundown church on Hutchinson Street, and unlike the tropes of a rated PG-13 horror movie, this stranger didn't just scare the little 5-year-old girl who walked past him in the dark and slip out like a ghost.

The man took the little girl by the hand, out into a tiny, weed-choked backyard, where police said he beat her with his fists and boots until her little face was broken.

Nothing was stolen. No one else in the house was hurt and no one, even the police, can understand it.

"It's about as bad as it gets," Captain John Darby, commander of the Special Victims Unit, said at a noon news conference.

The girl's mother couldn't find her when she woke up at 7 a.m. Tuesday, Darby said, and with the help of neighbors, discovered her in the backyard, semiconscious in the vegetation, her eyes swollen like two plums.

The girl is being treated at St. Christopher's Hospital for multiple facial fractures, including a broken jaw, and abdominal injuries from being kicked in the stomach. Darby said police interviewed the girl at the hospital Wednesday and she told them she'd been wandering the hallway, and saw the man hiding behind a closet door. She remembered him stomping on her outside, Darby said, before she blacked out.

The girl, according to police, was not sexually assaulted.

Darby described the suspect as a tall black man, wearing a black shirt and tan shorts. He said people in the neighborhood were questioned and DNA evidence was recovered, but there's no official suspect.

On Hutchinson Street, near Lehigh, residents were still on edge yesterday.

Kids were inside or sent to stay with relatives. The street looks out for its own, one man said, and any stranger who winds up there late at night better have a good reason.

"We're squeezing this street down tight," said Charles Mcleod. "They better hope the cops find him first."

Mcleod said the girl's mother was frantic when she saw her in the weeds.

"She seemed like she was slipping into shock," he said.

Police believe the suspect climbed in through a side window in an alleyway that separates it from a cavernous, old church that's slowly being rehabilitated. Mcleod said the alleyway's steel door had been wide open for a few days.

The backyard also faces the church's courtyard, and a big, black shepherd mix lives in a doghouse by the fence. That dog barks at the slightest sound, neighbors said, but they didn't so much as hear a whimper or the little girl screaming.

Neighbors got chills yesterday in the sticky heat on Hutchinson Street, thinking the suspect could still be out there among them.

"Can you imagine what kind of person would do this to a little girl's face?" said Dolores Williams, 68. "She was sweet as can be."