For weeks, an elderly woman had been complaining to her family about strange knocking sounds coming from beneath her El Sereno home late at night. On Thursday, police made a horrifying discovery.
It wasn’t a stray opossum or raccoon that made the noise, it was a man. The man was reportedly naked and living in the basement crawl space of the woman’s home.
Ricardo Silva, the woman’s son-in-law, told NBC News that the noises were “usually late at night, so we thought there might have been an animal in the house.”
However, on Thursday, the 93-year-old woman’s family called the police after the noise became louder than usual.
Los Angeles Police Department officers responded to a call in the 3600 block of Rock Avenue around 10:30 p.m. Thursday and found a man under a home, according to a Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson.
A spokesperson said the man refused to come out of the basement residence and officers called in a SWAT team to assist in the arrest. After a standoff that lasted several hours, the man was taken into custody on suspicion of trespassing. Police were on the scene until 5 a.m., police said.
“He refused to leave,” Silva told NBC News. “He wasn’t afraid of it.” [police] dog, and the first two attempts [tear] The gas didn’t kick him out. ”
Police identified the suspect as 27-year-old Isaac Betancourt and reported that he was not wearing any clothes when he was found, NBC News reported.
Betancourt was arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department at 4:25 a.m. Friday and booked with misdemeanor charges, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He was released Saturday afternoon and is scheduled to be arraigned on Dec. 6.
Betancourt has previously been arrested in July 2022, August and October 2023, and March and August of this year, according to the LASD Inmate Information Center.
