Thursday, April 25, 2024

More than a dozen roommates and houseguests of a Cambridge man have accused him of secretly recording them showering or in their bedrooms, authorities said Friday after the Middlesex Superior Court arraignment of Teddy Browar-Jarus, 32.

Awoken one day last year by an unfamiliar beeping sound in her bedroom, a roommate discovered a cellphone on a bookshelf facing her bed – with the name “Teddy” on the home screen, Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan said in a press release. That led to police executing a search warrant on Browar-Jarus’ bedroom, where police allegedly found multiple recording devices.

At apartments in Cambridge and Somerville over four years starting in 2011, he filmed 13 women, police said, none of whom said they’d given permission for or knew about the recordings.

Browar-Jarus was charged with 26 counts of secretly recording an unsuspecting nude person, 11 counts of willful recording of oral communication and one count of attempting to video record an unsuspecting person in a state of nudity.

His tools included smartphones, a laptop and a hook camera, which Ryan described as “a camera that is similar in appearance to a plastic hook used to hang towels or robes in a bathroom, but with a hidden camera inside.”

“The investigation allegedly showed that the hook camera had been installed in the bathrooms of two Somerville apartments to record women entering and exiting the shower,” part of a forensic search of the defendant’s laptop that resulted in the discovery of dozens of videos of women in a state of undress, Ryan said. “Some in the bathroom, others engaged in sexual activity, as well as several female roommates in various state of undress in their own bedrooms.” Many videos also included recordings of conversations.

Clerk Magistrate Matthew Day released Browar-Jarus, a corporate trainer and former member of The Boston Whitecaps ultimate frisbee team, on personal recognizance and ordered him to have no contact with the victims or witnesses, and to not publicly identify any victim. The next scheduled hearing in this case is Oct. 7.