An elderly woman complained to her family for weeks about strange knocking noises coming from underneath her El Sereno home late at night. On Thursday, police made a grim discovery.

The voices were not a stray opossum or raccoon, but a man reportedly naked and living in the crawl space beneath the woman’s home, authorities said.

“The sounds were often heard late at night, so we attributed it to the presence of animals in the house,” said the woman’s son-in-law, Ricardo Silva. he told NBC News.

But on Thursday, he said, the sounds were much louder than normal, prompting the 93-year-old woman’s family to call the police.

The Los Angeles Police Department responded to a call in the 3600 block of Locke Avenue around 10:30 p.m. Thursday and found the man underneath the house, according to an LAPD spokesman.

The spokesman said the man refused to emerge from his underground home and officers called in a SWAT team to assist in the arrest. He said there was a standoff that lasted for hours before the man was taken into custody on suspicion of trespassing. He said police remained at the scene until 5 a.m.

“He refused to leave,” Silva told NBC News. “He wasn’t afraid of (police) dogs, and the first two (tear gas) attempts failed to catch him.”

Police identified the suspect as 27-year-old Isaac Betancourt, according to NBC News, which reported that he was clothingless when he was found.

Betancourt was arrested by the LAPD at 4:25 a.m. Friday morning and booked on a misdemeanor charge, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He was released Saturday afternoon and is scheduled to appear in court on December 6.

Betancourt was previously arrested in July 2022, August and October 2023, and in March and August this year, according to the LASD Inmate Information Center.

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This story first appeared on: Los Angeles Times.