A naked man was arrested by police after he was found hiding in a crawl space beneath a 93-year-old woman’s house in El Sereno, Calif. early Friday morning.
Issac Betancourt, 27, is suspected to have been living underneath the home for nearly six months — and he wouldn’t go down without a fight.
Los Angeles police said that the extraction took hours and countless resources, including tear gas. Their efforts took so long and caused such a ruckus that sleeping neighbors resorted to finding other places to stay for the rest of the night.
“He refused to leave. He wasn’t scared of the dogs, and the first two attempts at gas didn’t fish him out,” Ricardo Silva, the son-in-law of the homeowner, told NBC News.
Silva and the rest of the family reported hearing strange noises for weeks on end, but assumed that it was a wild animal. They called the police once the noises became impossible to ignore.
“The noises were kind of like knocking. It was kind of like, as my wife was walking, they were kind of knocking back from under the house so she says, ‘You know something’s wrong,’” Silva said.
The crawl space itself was barely 2 feet tall and spanned across the bottom of the house with three different entryways. The family thinks that he only used one of the exits to come and go as he pleased, and they plan to board up the crawl space as soon as possible.
“It’s a bizarre thing, but it’s not probably uncommon, you know. In this day and age, people are looking for shelter,” Silva said.
Betancourt was arrested for trespassing on the grounds, the LAPD said. It is not clear if he has an attorney.
