Naked Man Living In 92-Year-Old’s Crawl Space Flushed Out By SWAT Team.
LOS ANGELES, CA — It took a SWAT Team to smoke out a naked man who moved into the crawl space of an El Sereno home belonging to a 93-year-old woman, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The woman had been complaining to family members about strange bumps and noises late at night coming from beneath her home in the 3600 block of Locke Avenue, NBC News reported.
“It was usually late at night, and we just chucked it off to animals being under the house,” Ricardo Silva, the woman’s son-in-law told NBC News.
But on Nov. 7, the noises were unusually loud.
“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,” added Silva.
The family called police at about 10:30 p.m., and officers found a naked man who refused to come out, according to an LAPD spokesman.
The SWAT team arrived and deployed police dogs and tear gas, which eventually flushed him out after hours of trying.
“He refused to leave,” Silva told NBC News. “He wasn’t scared of the dogs, and the first two attempts at gas didn’t fish him out.”
Eventually, police were able to arrest 27-year-old Isaac Betancourt on suspicion of trespassing.
Authorities weren’t certain how long he had been living in the crawl space.
“It’s a bizarre thing, but it’s not probably uncommon, you know, in this day and age, people are looking for shelter,” Silva told the New York Times.
In fact, Betancourt is not the only crawl space denizen residents and authorities in Los Angeles County have had to deal with.
In September, a Sierra Madre couple discovered a bear had been squatting in their crawl space. Before that, LA’s beloved mountain lion P-22 famously took up residence in the crawl space of a Los Feliz home until he was security technicians who saw him while installing equipment in the home. It happened again in 2020, when an injured mountain lion sought safety in the crawl space of a home in Monrovia, giving residents the scare of their life.
