42-year-old Derrick Walker is charged with attempted kidnapping, unlawful restraint and related offenses.
12-year-old Trinity Jarmon of North Philadelphia told her story to Action News Wednesday night.
Trinity was on her way to school earlier that morning near 18th and Dauphin streets when she says she was approached by a man in a red station wagon who she thought was going to ask for directions, but instead asked her a very lewd question.
Trinity says she just looked and kept on walking.
"And he reached out the window and grabbed my wrist and I jumped away from him," Trinity said.
The scared child ran home to tell her grandmother Rosie Lawrence.
"I said, 'What's wrong with you?' She said, 'Some man just tried to grab me,'" Rosie said.
Rosie quickly called 911 and the girl's mother who was at work.
"I was scared because I felt that he was going to come back," Trinity said.
And apparently her fears were real, because while police were questioning the girl, the car pulled up from around the corner.
"She said, 'that's him! that's him!' and she clammed up and started shaking and biting on her hand," Trinity's mother Keyana Jarmon said.
Police captured the man, who wasn't wearing any underwear.
Inside the car, they found a pair of binoculars, a camera, and, on the driver's seat, a bunch of newspapers he had been sitting on.
Police say he was already being sought for three similar incidents in recent days including one earlier in the morning involving an 11-year-old girl at 20th and Norris streets.
It turns out, Walker had previously been arrested and convicted back in 2002 in Upper Darby for two similar incidents.
He was sent to jail for grabbing a 15-year-old girl's buttocks whom he followed into the Beverly Hills Middle School and grabbing the buttocks of another 15-year-old at Hampden Road and Walnut Street.
Meanwhile, Trinity, whose dream is to become a police officer, says this case has given her first hand experience in fighting crime.
"It gives me a better view on what type of person to look for and what type of person that I know that'll take a child," Trinity said.
Police are seeking a search warrant to learn what kind of pictures were on that camera and what else was in the car.
The bail for Walker has been set at $250,000.
