Featured Image Credit: KCAL News/Youtube
Topics: California, US News, Crime, Police
Callum Jones
A woman who heard 'animal noises' for months was shocked to discover the truth of what was living under her house.
For weeks, an elderly woman from California was creeped out by noises she had been hearing for weeks in her El Sereno neighborhood home.
The woman and her family had initially dismissed the nighttime noise as typical disturbances from dogs and cats in the area, which made her concerns lessen.
However, as those noises appeared louder, she called authorities.
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Police subsequently searched under the house to see what they could find.
To everyone's amazement, they found a naked man in the crawlspace, a place he seemed to have been living in for a long period of time.
Ricardo Silva, the son-in-law of the 93-year-old homeowner, said: "It was usually late at night, and we just chucked it off to animals being under the house. 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."
It wasn't simple to remove the man from underneath the house as he refused to leave the area.
Police spent many hours trying to convince the man to crawl out, but that did not work.
Officials even tried to scare the man with police dogs, though he was very much unfazed by the deployment.
The man was eventually moved after police loaded tear gas into the crawlspace.
He has since been identified as 27-year-old Issac Betancour, with police believing he lived under the house for a period of six months.
"He refused to leave. He wasn’t scared of the dogs, and the first two attempts at gas didn’t fish him out," Silva added.
"It’s a bizarre thing, but it’s not probably uncommon, you know, in this day and age, people are looking for shelter."
Betancour was subsequently detained and also sent for medical checks at a nearby hospital, according to CBS.
To prevent similar incidents from happening again in the future, the family is planning to block access to the crawlspace, which is two-foot high.