Video shows California woman with pickaxe smashing windows

Terrifying security camera video caught the moment a woman used a pickaxe to smash several windows of a California home – where a grandmother was babysitting a newborn just inches away.

The woman, wearing a long gown and wielding the weapon, is seen marching up to the home on Asbury Drive in Pasadena on Monday and smashing a window in an unprovoked attack, the video posted by KTLA shows.

The grandmother is heard shrieking.

The unhinged attacker walks off with the pickaxe slung over her shoulder and yells, “Questions? Questions? I’ll be back! Get out!”

She then returns brazenly and unleashes several more strikes that break more windows.

Homeowner Arman Tchoukadarian told KTLA his mother-in-law was watching his baby daughter, who was sleeping in a bassinet near a front window at the time of the attack.

The grandmother managed to remove the child in the nick of time from under the first window struck, he said.

“If my mother-in-law didn’t act as fast as she did, my daughter wouldn’t be here,” Tchoukadarian told the station.

“She broke one window, went back,” he said. “My mother-in-law came out screaming and yelling to get my attention.”  

Police caught up with the woman — identified as 65-year-old Beverly Baker — at her nearby home on Casa Grande Street, where she refused to surrender for about 30 minutes before being arrested on felony charges of vandalism, KTLA reported.

Police found her “nonchalant, walking with a pickaxe on her back like she’d just finished working with it,” Tchoukadarian told the news outlet.

Police said she may be suffering from a mental illness, though that has not been confirmed.  

“I feel like we lost our safe place,” Tchoukadarian said. “She needs to be in the right place, getting the right help That’s no excuse to go attack someone’s family, attack someone’s newborn and ruin their dream home, and ruin their life and sanity.”

Tchoukadarian said the family does not know who the woman is, other than that she lives nearby, news station KCAL reported.

He estimated the damage at the home in the city northeast of downtown Los Angeles at about $20,000.

Recent crime statistics show several major US cities, including Los Angeles, are on track to surpass last year’s already-shocking rates of violent crime. Over the past year, the number of homicides in the city has spiked by 7%.