Melendez and his mother left with the police officer's card, on which the officer had written a short description of the incident. His mother jotted down the squatter's cellphone number and name: Brent Darrin Zubek.
That was the end of LAPD's help regarding the trouble-plagued house — until the bodies of Zubek's two housemates turned up in the trash.
Eviction lawyer Dennis Block says squatters with faked lease documents have become a real problem during the recession, but LAPD and other police departments rarely get involved. "The police will look at a rental agreement or take their word for it," Block says. "The police will say, 'I'm not a judge. You've got to take them to court.' "
Eviction lawyer Melissa Marsh says squatters "can get a lease agreement off the Internet, but when you ask them for proof of payment, they can't do it."
The problem LAPD faced on Lassen Street was that "we don't allow for any jurisdiction to take the law into their own hands, and police don't want to face charges." Block agrees that the police acted properly under the letter of the law.
But LAPD had solid evidence that Zubek was lying.
Melendez says Zubek acted angry, "like a guy who was getting kicked out of his own house," yet when LAPD officers asked Zubek to describe his landlord, Zubek wrongly described a tall white woman. Melendez's mother is Salvadoran.
The DWP says L.A. has 4,715 unoccupied single homes and 35,919 empty apartment units and other multiple dwellings — 4,804 more than in December 2007, when the city had 3,624 vacant single homes and 32,206 multiple-dwelling homes. The DWP determines these figures by counting idle water and power readings.
Los Angeles Housing Department spokeswoman Deanna McNeally, whose agency hosts the city's vacancy data on its website, says it was not "appropriate" for her agency to explain how the City of Los Angeles accounts for, or identifies, squatters who dupe the city into reconnecting the utilities, or who find ways to turn the electricity on themselves.
The DWP did not respond to the Weekly's request for a response. For its part, LAPD is refusing to answer questions about what unfolded on Lassen Street.
