By Marc Larocque

At 9:07 a.m. on a recent Friday, Michael Baptist assumed he would be the only person awake in his first-floor Mission Hill apartment. His roommates were away and a friend, a fellow Northeastern student who often spent nights there, was asleep in a room across the hall. Baptist rolled out of bed in his boxers, draped a towel around himself and headed toward the bathroom. He was preparing for what would have been a typical day, working for a local film production company.

As he stepped into the hallway, the first thing he saw was the glimmer of a knife.”If I charged him, he probably would have stabbed me,” Baptist, a middler English major, recalled later in an interview with The News.

He looked up to see the intruder, who brandished a knife in his right hand and said: “I’m taking your stuff.” Baptist immediately ran into his room, locked the door and grabbed his cell phone along with his own butterfly knife.

“There was no emotion, just instinct,” Baptist said, while rolling the same butterfly knife in his hands. “It’s a real city here, not like the sheltered Northeastern campus.”

At the end of August and moving into September there has been a rise in breaking and entering incidents in Mission Hill, coinciding with students moving out and into new apartments, said Officer James Kenneally a Boston Police spokesman.

“It’s well understood that when students come to the communities for school, they have valuable stuff,” Kenealley said. “And thieves know that.”

Baptist called 911 and began to bang on the wall, hollering for his friend. “Pete!” he screamed five times. He heard nothing, waited about 15 seconds to compose himself and peered out the door. He slowly walked toward the back of the house.

The sunlight beamed through an open window in the living room and the back door was open.

“I was going into the living room, thinking if he was going to be there or not,” Baptist said. “It was the defining moment.”

But the intruder was gone, as well as Baptist’s backpack and a Playstation 3 owned by one of his roommates. Electrical cords for other devices were stripped from the outlets. Baptist walked out into his fenced backyard and looked around for less than two minutes. The suspect had entered the house through the window, which was unlocked.

As Baptist walked back into his, now, former Pontiac Street apartment, police were already there. He waited along with a female officer while other officers chased the suspect. Baptist listened to the pursuit on the female police officer’s radio: “The cops soon said ‘Suspect sighted. Pursuit, pursuit. There he is! There he is!’ You heard people yelling and feet smacking the ground,” Baptist recalled.

Police searched the rest of the building and Baptist woke up his friend, Pete Lugo, a middler sociology major. At first, Lugo didn’t believe that the incident took place, until the female officer poked her head into the room he was sleeping in, Baptist said.

Police apprehended the suspect at 9:16 a.m. They bought the suspect back and Baptist positively identified him: Decosta Turner, 17, of Roxbury, was arrested and charged with assault by means of a dangerous weapon, armed assault in a dwelling, home invasion and breaking and entering of a dwelling house. Police seized two plastic bags containing marijuana and recovered the Playstation 3, now broken, a Playstation controller and a “Fight Night” video game, which were all in Baptist’s backpack, discarded in a shed on Tremont Street.

Although the Playstation was rendered useless, Baptist does not think it fair to disregard Turner as useless for any addictions he may have.

“Three-hundred dollars won’t get you far from where you’re at,” Baptist said of the Playstation’s value. “He was probably just thinking of getting some new shoes and picking up an eighth or something. This guy seemed like he was really struggling.”

And as the ordeal ended at 9:25 a.m., Baptist’s instinctual terror waned and he grew empathy for Turner.

“I wanted to talk to him at first,” he said. “I didn’t bring this up with the police. But I’d like to talk to him now, because we are both people of this Earth.”

Baptist is now living on a second floor apartment nearby and feels safer because of this. The new tenants of 71 Pontiac St., Apt. 1 will make sure to lock their doors and windows, they said, as Baptist informed them of the incident.