This week, a Connecticut landlord was arrested after being caught on camera sniffing a tenant’s underwear while she and her daughter were out. The incident was caught on a hidden video camera the tenant set up. Orellana-Arias was arrested with third-degree burglary for the act.
This is actually more common than people think and happens all the time. The surveillance cameras the landlord uses for the garage and the front door are also used to learn a tenant’s habits and schedules in many instances.
I lived in an apartment in the Valley of Los Angeles where the landlord and the maintenance man would sit in the office each morning and eat breakfast while monitoring about 12 video cameras, watching tenants leave for work and trips, (luggage of course is a dead give-a-way).
Tenants started complaining when we would see each other in the garage about odd items missing, from jars of change to irons to lights being left on that they never turned on when they came home from a short trip.
One of the tenants had left with his girlfriend one morning and when the girlfriend returned to get her laptop it was missing.
Another man was in his apartment meditating after taking the day off of work when he heard someone put a key in his front door and open it. It was the maintenance man, he walked in then shyly walked out.
A new female tenant stated that her toilet set was up several times when she came home.
Finally, one day while washing clothes, I noticed the maintenance man coming out of an apartment next to the laundry room about 11 am. He looked like he had been busted doing something wrong. I was talking to neighbors, a young couple with a newborn, in the garage about it that day and told them I was going to check with the tenant in a couple of hours to see if they knew anything about it.
To my surprise when I knocked on the door it was the same couple I had talked to in the garage. They were visibly upset and said there was no reason for the maintenance man to be in their apartment.
They called the landlord and he lied and said he went into the wrong apartment. But the couple said they noticed underwear in the drawer had been unfolded and shifted around.
They moved almost immediately.
In this situation, the landlord and the maintenance man, who was the black sheep of the owner’s family, were working in concert to break into tenants’ homes.
Tenants are often at an impasse because the landlord is required to have access into a tenant’s apartment with a key but the tenant also has to come and go. STILL, this is a crime and even if arrests can’t be made suits can be filed in small claims court.
Here are some ways to protect yourself from being a victim of this situation.
You are supposed to get 24 hours’ notice for the landlord to enter your home (depending on your state) and it has to be for maintenance purposes. It would be wise for you to let them know you need to be there whenever they need to enter your home.