For weeks, an elderly woman complained to her family about the strange knocking sounds coming from beneath her El Sereno home late at night. On Thursday, police made a terrifying discovery.
The noises were no stray opossum or raccoon but a man — reportedly naked and, authorities said, living in the crawl space underneath the woman’s home.
The noises “were usually late at night, so we just chalked it up to animals being in the house,” the woman’s son-in-law Ricardo Silva told NBC News.
But on Thursday, the sounds were much louder than usual, prompting the family of the 93-year-old woman to phone the police, he said.
The Los Angeles Police Department responded to a call at the 3600 block of Locke Avenue around 10:30 p.m. Thursday and discovered the man underneath the house, according to an LAPD spokesperson.
The man refused to emerge from his underground dwelling, and officers called in a SWAT team to assist with the arrest, the spokesperson said. An hours-long standoff ensued before the man was taken into custody on suspicion of trespassing, he said. Police remained on scene until 5 a.m., he said.
“He refused to leave,” Silva told NBC News. “He wasn’t scared of the [police] dogs, and the first two attempts at [tear] gas didn’t fish him out.”
Police identified the suspect as 27-year-old Isaac Betancourt, according to NBC News, which reported that he was without clothes when he was found.
Betancourt was arrested by the LAPD at 4:25 a.m. Friday and booked on a misdemeanor charge, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He was released Saturday afternoon and scheduled to be arraigned Dec. 6.
Betancourt was previously arrested in July 2022, August and October of 2023 and this year in March and August, according to the LASD Inmate Information Center.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
