For weeks, an elderly woman complained to her family about strange banging noises coming from under her home in El Sereno, a Los Angeles neighborhood, during the night.
A few days ago, the police discovered that it was not some strange animal, as the relatives of the woman had initially assumed, but rather, a naked man living in the crawl space just below the home in question.
Last night, because of the loud noises, it was the 93-year-old woman’s relatives themselves who called the police. Once they arrived at the 3600 block of Locke Avenue, the officers were confronted with a rather unexpected scene. The man just wouldn’t come out, and eventually it took the SWAT team to make an arrest and bring the situation under control, by 5 a.m.
“He was not afraid of the police dogs,” said a family member of the building owner, ”They tried to get him out with the use of tear gas, but the first two attempts failed.”
The man was later identified as 27-year-old Isaac Betancourt. The young man was taken into custody by the LAPD on trespassing charges and spent last weekend behind bars, and later released. He is due to appear before a judge on December 6.
The 27-year-old was already known to law enforcement: in fact, the latter had been arrested in July 2022, in August and October 2023, and twice between March and August 2024. It is currently unclear how long Betancourt had been living under the 93-year-old’s home: according to her family members, it is likely that the man had been there for at least six months.
“It’s a rather bizarre thing,” said Ricardo Silva, the woman’s son-in-law, ”but it’s actually not as rare as you might think. Nowadays, many people look for shelter anywhere. Usually, we attribute those noises to animals, like possums. But the other night it sounded like someone was knocking from under the floor. That’s why we called the police.”
