Center: Ashly Guardino describes her experience finding a stranger living in the crawlspace under her home (right). The man was later taken into custody (left). (Images via TikTok.)
A woman who looked outside her front door to investigate strange sounds was shocked at what she ultimately found: a stranger apparently living in a crawlspace underneath her house.
Ashly Guardino took to TikTok on Saturday to share details of the early-morning scare that caused her to call the police.
“We heard this noise,” she says, explaining that she and her partner thought there might have been someone on the roof of their rental home in Lake Elsinore, California, an inland city around halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. “I look outside the front door, like I’m peeking out, and I see the grass moving,” she says.
Guardino then flips the camera to show a small square opening obscured by grass.
“A f—— arm comes out of the hole and is feeling around,” she says. “A dirty-a– arm, feeling around this hole outside.”
“There is a whole-a– man living here for months, living underneath the house,” she says. “Do you know how creepy it is to see a f—— arm come out of this, feeling around the side of the house? Imagine being half awake and seeing an arm, a dirty arm, come out of this hole.”
Video shows police officers persuading the man to come out from the crawlspace and taking him into custody.
More from Law&Crime: Men posing as police officers bound and killed teen girl during broad daylight home invasion robbery: Cops
In a different post, Guardino says she grabbed a mop and started stabbing at the man until he “retreated,” at least temporarily. She then went to the side of the house where a larger hole served as the access point to the crawlspace and ordered the man to leave.
“Get the f— out,” she says she yelled at him. “What are you doing in our house? Get out of it, you’re a weirdo!”
Guardino said she told her partner to call the police, who took around 30 minutes to arrive.
In subsequent TikTok posts, Guardino explains that it wasn’t unusual for their landlord to do work on the house at odd hours.
She also explained that, in hindsight, it’s possible the man had been staying in the crawlspace for months.
“The reason I think it was three months is because this access [point] had a screen on it, and the screen had been knocked off two to three times per week, and I put it back on because I didn’t want the cats to get in there,” Guardino said, adding that she thought that cats may have been getting into the crawlspace but then knocking the screen out when they left. She said that had been going on for around three months.
Guardino also said that they “remember hearing some knocking, whistling, different things noises going on in the house.” She and her partner attributed it to being “the TV, or the wind, or whatnot.”
“Now we know it was a grown-a– man,” she said. “Just a man.”
The man has not been publicly identified. Guardino said in a video that he was on parole when he was discovered under the house and is being held without bail. Riverside County officials did not immediately respond to Law&Crime’s request for comment.
According to Guardino’s TikTok, she and her partner have been approved for a new rental home and plan to move.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
