An interview published Thursday with “Squatter Hunter” Flash Shelton gave haunting insight into the home intruder and squatter crisis plaguing America.
Shelton, a former handyman from California, shot to fame after helping his mother “evict” unlawful squatters from her home after his father died in 2019, according to Fox News Digital. The intruders broke into the property and moved in their own furniture, meaning state law enforcement couldn’t help. But Shelton had his own ideas, researching various loopholes to remove the invaders from the property. You might want to take notes if – God forbid – something like this should ever happen to you. (WATCH: AMERICAN SQUATTER: The Homeowners’ Struggle to Take Back What’s Theirs)
“I figured out that if I could establish the rights [to the home] before them and I could switch places with them and become their squatter, then that would work,” Shelton explained. He signed a lease agreement with his mother and made his way over to the home. “It was just switching places with them, becoming their squatter, locking them out, putting up cameras and telling them that I would prosecute if they broke back in — [that] was enough,” he continued. Now he’s helping families with the same problem across the country. And it’s a big, big problem.
Two of three weeks a month, Shelton travels to deal with squatters. Each case takes a great deal of time to prepare for and comes with a big adrenaline rush, he told the outlet. (RELATED: REPORT: Squatters Turn $4.6 Million Mansion Into Party House In Perfect Example Of Social Decline)
In one of his cases, a woman posed as a caregiver for an elderly patient in Culver City, California. “That was the craziest situation. Because she didn’t care. She didn’t care that I had barricaded her, that she only had access to her bedroom,” Shelton said of the woman, who climbed in and out of a window to continue living inside the property. “She had no bathroom. She had no electricity. She had no water. But she didn’t care because in her deranged, narcissistic mind, she was going to own that house when the 88-year-old woman passed away.”
He says the worst squatting stories are the ones where the intruder has nothing to lose. He warns people not to put their lives in danger over property. There are other options. (RELATED: Virginia Home Sells Despite Squatter Living In Basement)
“The states that are friendly to squatters — those squatters are just assuming tenant rights. So what we need to do is separate it out. And if somebody enters a house illegally, regardless of how long they’ve been there, that should be a crime,” he says of policy.
