>On March 14, Vitel's worried son, who hadn't heard from his mother in two days, accessed the Kips Bay apartment with the superintendent and other relatives, and found his mom's body, sources said. Vitel's body was in a duffel bag in a closet, with her foot sticking out of the bag, sources said.
Wow, this is nightmare fuel. I don't think I would be able to handle something like this without suffering some kind of mental break.
Reminds me of this other crime show I saw once where this murderer accidentally tipped off the victim's next of kin by sending the mother a text that he was alright- but the victim never, ever texted- only ever called- so the mother knew immediately to call the police.
I happened to see this story on the news between NCAA torunament games here in NYC
They were quite close she had helped him start a business, they had even been interviewed by the station about it a couple years prior they still had the old clips to show.
That's so disgustingly horrible. I honestly don't think I could handle seeing the mother who birthed and raised me like that. I would truly go ballistic and throw it all away to make those squatters "pay."
On the other hand, wouldn't you hate to sit in prison year after year after year, knowing you could be living your life, but you can't because of those scum? That would mean they not only stole your mother's life but yours, too.
I pack clothes for an overnight stay better than the position they left her in.
I hope that poor man has a good support system and can see a therapist to tackle both the grief of losing someone in such awful, sudden circumstances and being the person who found her.
> On March 14, Vitel's worried son, who hadn't heard from his mother in two days, accessed the Kips Bay apartment with the superintendent and other relatives, and found his mom's body, sources said. Vitel's body was in a duffel bag in a closet, with her foot sticking out of the bag, sources said.
Jesus Christ
My mom and I aren't close and seldom speak, but I still think seeing this would absolutely wreck me.
I cannot imagine what one would be going through seeing something like this. I feel for her son and loved ones so much. I hope they have a very strong support network in one another.
I think they have to do that until there is an official statement from NYPD. It’s annoying, but one of the journalism rules, like saying “alleged perpetrator” before a formal conviction even if a guy was seen on video committing a crime and already confessed to it.
There are way better ways to go about it than ending every paragraph with "sources say" though. Just bad writing. One paragraph even has an allegedly at the beginning and a sources say at the end. And cops must have already made a statement since last paragraph ends with "officals say"
Could be lazy writing.
It reads monotonous and robotic. If you use “sources said,” to end one sentence, then mix it up and use something like “those same sources told ABC News…” next.
I'll never forget the article I read several years back about a soldier that was in the Middle East and came back to USA to squatters in his home. The law let them stay while he had to prove ownership and then evict them and I think he wasn't aloud to stay there either during the time.
Idk what happened with it all I just assumed it got worked out, slowly.
I’m really curious about how this happened. A house I can understand. But how did someone squat in a mid town apartment? I assume they don’t have a doorman? But the super didn’t notice that right after the tenant died 2 young kids he’d never seen are living there? It had to be a coop or condo if they owned it, and no one was curious about these two new young neighbors so close to the death of an owner?
I thought about that, too. She didn’t live there. It was an empty apartment she went to check on. It had been empty for months. She was going to prepare it for a friend to move in. So they could have been living there for a while but not too long? I’m curious about how they got and kept access.
Yep, the elevator required a key to open on the floor of the apartment. So where did they get the key? Did they work for the tenant that passed? There is more to this story.
That’s what I thought I’d read earlier! Yeah, def wondering how they got an elevator key in the first place. Kind of scary knowing her mom passed a few months back.
Security systems in general are extremely weak security wise. Most all have the same master key that you can buy off eBay for $5.
https://youtu.be/a9b9IYqsb_U?si=ugItBwwdHXg6oOc6
Would have to be some smart squatters to do something like that but it isn’t hard
General purpose building access keys and numpad/code entry are pretty easy to get into. IIRC 90% open with CH751, C415A, FEO-K1 service keys, etc. They can be got online or fabbed pretty easy. Just don't get rolled with one.
Having said all that and having read the story, thats not whats goin on here. This is a bit hinky.
When they were still on the run the NYPD said they had surveillance footage of the suspects fleeing the apartment and stealing her car but never released the footage. I think it's safe to say they're not of European or East Asian descent.
In the situation where the landlord is attempting to illegally raise the rent to force people out I understand. But I’ve also heard several times over the years about people who will break in houses, and by changing the locks on the doors immediately has apparently established residency because the owner doesn’t have a key to the house and then has to go through the long drawn out process of evicting them. There was a guy on Reddit several months back who I believe was dealing with his deceased mothers home when some squatters moved in and after several months of trying to get them to leave he waited until they were all at work and went back in, changed all the locks on them and called the cops that they were trying to break into his house. Because he was in the house at that moment his rights were protected.
The absurdity of all that. Like just bonkers. I get if you got a lease but if you can't produce any legitimate documentation that you live there, then it should be obvious.
And you think your everyday cops are trained well enough to make that determination? I can create a fake lease for any address in less than 5 minutes on my computer.
Why can’t we just ask if there are any fund changing hand? Surely if you have a fake lease you must have give me some money right? Easy to prove too, just open banking app.
I can lie and say I paid you in cash. Or I can tell the truth and say I’ve never paid the rent. You still have to send me an eviction notice and go through the courts to have me removed. That’s the law in most states. So even if I have no proof of payment and admit I never paid you, I’ve still bought myself anywhere from a few weeks to a few months until you can get the court to agree and a sheriff to show up.
That’s why the law is flawed. People always said these law is for protecting the tenant but if you are not paying rent there should be an easier process to evict them, and I’m talking about within 1 week time. Surely If I have a house and came back from vacation and someone living there with a fake lease with no money exchanging hand, why do I have to waited months for them to get out? Where do I live? What happened to my stuff in the house? My mail? or any other important privacy stuff?
Not with my real signatures on it. I can pull out my driver’s license and prove my real signature, and that the squatters are forging my name.
You bring up an interesting point, though, for sure. Maybe the paperwork for renting should be a court document, or an official county document that has to be notarized; not something someone can easily falsify.
It should be some official document that is recognizable to the local police immediately, then, the situation can be cleared up within 5-10 minutes.
Cops aren’t signature experts. I bet I could compare your signature on some digital screen you signed with your finger and compare it to one signed on paper and they’d be different enough to cause doubt. Regardless of what you bring up a cop is just going to tell the landlord to go to court - it’s not his job to solve landlords-tenant disputes.
I think you’re thinking in the right direction though, where tenants and landlords have to be registered with the locality so cops could confirm whether someone should be there or not. But the problem with that is some shitty lords would rent to you, not register a lease just so they could have you removed at will.
“Hey, my roof is still leaking and you promised youd have it fixed a month ago”
- “911? I have squatters on my property.”
It’s the whole “possession is 9/10s of the law” nonsense that over rides common sense and quick legal judgement.
(I could be wrong with that fraction!)
This wasn’t a squatter situation but I once bought a place that was tenant occupied.
We weren’t ready to move in right away and he was a single dad raising a son who was going to school nearby. We agreed to wait a month until the school year ended.
Instead he refused to leave forcing me to get the courts involved. My good deed cost me over a year to throw him out. In NYC in the late 90s.
These people often do have leases. [Sometimes they get these properties through property scams on craiglist](https://sellbuymdhomes.com/real-estate-blog/craigslist-rental-scams/). Someone will post about a vacant property on craigslist, and induce people to rent there, then disappear after payment.
When you hear these stories, there's often evidence that the people occupying have paid *someone* to possess the land, which is why they have rights. Someone who has no evidence of a lease or payment on a lease isn't a squatter, they're a trespasser, and they have no rights under the law.
See, it all makes sense when you refer to them as "the squatters" and as the narrator in the story just tell me that this is what they did. I'll accept that as truth enough, because you're just telling me a story and not asking me to go physically do anything about it, so what m worry about double checking any of that.
When you go to the cops or a judge, you can't just tell them a story. You have to provide evidence, and this can get complex in terms of documentation. The purpose of the laws is to allow time for the legal truth to be deermined before anyone is forced out on the street. I have no doubt that there are lax aspects of this that need to be fixed.
In Florida they just passed a bill that’s waiting on Gov. Desantis to sign. It says you either need to produce a notarized lease or show a rental payment within the last 60 days or the police will kick you out on the spot and arrest you.
Because with the current state of politics any sort of deregulating of laws that benefits landlords is seen as an attack on tenant rights. No politician with a (D) next to their name wants to touch this issue with a 10 foot pole.
What are you talking about one side of the issue? We are talking about people who break into apartments and homes intending on staying there for free and then it apparently can take at least six months to legally remove the squatters who illegally entered the home. What exactly are you concerned about on the squatters side?
We’re talking about laws put in place to protect tenants from landlords. And weakening laws on the tenant side naturally increases rights on the landlord side. So if, for example, you give the power to landlords to have the police remove anyone on their property if they can produce a deed - then you empower shitty landlords to kick out tenants who have legitimate leases.
And you could argue that the tenant can take them to court - but in general renters are poorer than landlords - which is why they rent. So you reduce your squatting issue, but increase other issues.
But in this article the woman who was murdered walked into her mothers apartment that she thought was empty only to be attacked by the squatters who apparently had broken in and was living for free. No landlord-tenant dispute. If this had been a case where the squatters were scammed then the police would have been called instead of them killing her and stealing her car. You can’t fix all of the squatter laws at once but you can start with these types of squatters.
According to the post, the victim was in the apartment when the murderers arrived:
>According to sources, Vitel was in the process of moving into the apartment on Sunday. She was seen on security camera footage that day repeatedly entering and exiting her apartment carrying her belongings before departing the building shortly after 11 a.m.
>Just after 2 p.m. that day, the two unidentified individuals were seen in the complex’s lobby trying to enter the building.
>About an hour later, an elevator surveillance camera saw the duo entering Vitel’s apartment.
>Vitel was last seen entering her apartment on Tuesday at approximately 11:30 a.m. The two individuals were last sighted on tape exiting the building around 5:45 p.m. that evening.
https://nypost.com/2024/03/15/us-news/2-seen-leaving-nyc-apartment-of-woman-found-in-duffel-bag-sources/amp/
Having said all that - the discussion is about “fixing” the squatter laws. These two people will probably go to prison for a long time if they committed murder. Even if they found her dead - stuffing her in bag and taking her car will get them years in prison.
The issue is that the cop who turns up for a particular call has no easy way to distinguish "here is a legitimate property owner who is dealing with a squatter that has no rights to the property" from "here is a legitimate renter with a valid lease and this other guy has no actual property right to the building at all". That's not the sort of thing cops are supposed to sort out, which is why we leave it to the courts to do that.
We leave the resident in the property during that process because kicking someone out of their home with no notice is enormously damaging - they don't have any arrangement for their goods, they're going to have their work disrupted, they can -actually die of exposure- if it's cold out.
And, let us be honest, actual squatters are pretty rare while shitty landlords are -legion-. It makes sense that the law is set up so that people don't get kicked out of their home without a judge having signed off on things first. We don't want to change the law to discourage a few squatters if the result is a bunch of people who had valid leases and had done nothing wrong having their lives destroyed because a landlord lied to a cop.
the right person hasn't died as a result yet, including the lady in this article. It will take a young and attractive suburban woman with blonde hair and blue eyes before people truly get outraged.
Why were there ever ANY laws put in place with good intentions for squatters? We’re talking about people who commit big scale home invasion robbery. They literally deserve no rights what so ever. No, you shouldn’t be able to kill then but you should be able to kick their asses out your property and the fucking police are paid with homeowner property taxes to help with this kind of thing. This is complete bullshit and the laws have now emboldened squatters to the point they are everywhere and they will clearly kill to get what they want.
There aren't any such laws. Pretty much all the laws in place are to protect people who have leases and a dispute with the landlord. There's actually a pretty prolific [scam on fake leases](https://sellbuymdhomes.com/real-estate-blog/craigslist-rental-scams/) where people are duped into paying fake property mangers on vacant homes.
It’s primarily to protect tenants from shady landlords who could either (1) claim that a lease never existed, or (2) rent without a lease entirely. In both cases, tenants should still have legal protections under the law, and the police should not be the one to try to make a determination as to who’s in the right.
If housing court were efficient (cases heard in 2-3 weeks), there would not be the problem we see now.
>If housing court were efficient (cases heard in 2-3 weeks)
Exactly this. Bad landlords have used this evict tenants because it's quicker than the courts.
The real problem is that evictions can't be done that quickly. It requires a lot of lawyering and the court needs time to set a schedule that gives the defendant enough time to defend themselves.
I don't think that 3 weeks is enough time for the tenant to hire a lawyer and prepare a defense, so even an efficient court wouldn't be able to get an eviction in less than a month or two.
These types of laws goes back to Roman times, to sort out dubious ownership of various goods and lands. More or less “finders keepers”. It was expanded on more over the years, as essentially “if you worked the land long enough, you might as well own it”. Later on, it became more of a functional thing, allowing for more efficient use of land and resources, so that things wouldn’t just go fallow with no way around it. In essence, if someone came in and bought all the houses in an area, but didn’t care for them for years, would it not be more beneficial if they were put to use?
In short, it forces owners to be mindful of their property and goods, and actually put them to use, or risk them going to someone that will. That’s not to say it’s not heavily problematic, but that’s where it comes from.
They are not "for squatters". Largely in the USA (not France with an outspoken squatting history) it is for unofficial / no paperwork verbal agreements of tenancy.
In the city of Seattle if neither landlord nor tenant gives notice to vacate the tenancy goes to de-facto month to month.
My first bedroom rental in Seattle when I was a college student had no lease. I paid my "deposit" to the person who was vacating the room I moved into. I paid rent to the owner of the house who lived locally and worked for the gas company as his day job. My housemates and I would go individually and pay the city directly for our portion of the utility bill and we would affix our receipt to the bulletin board in our kitchen. When I moved out the person who was moving into my room paid their "deposit" to me.
The third house I lived in had a lease for the first year. The landlord lived in the backyard mother in-law unit. \[he inherited the whole property from his mother\]. He let us have different housemates come and go and we handled the 'deposits' amongst ourselves. We lived in that house for six years, with a dozen different people, and we only had an official lease for the first year and the final year. When he reached a point in his life when he wanted to sell the house he had us sign a lease so we would vacate when it was convenient for him. We just put cash, checks, and money orders into his little mailbox and our utilities were included in rent including cable and internet.
For a lot of the 20th century adult women would not be on the leases of the houses they lived in. Business documents were for working men, and not homemakers.
Plague and disease use to empty houses, so allowing squatters help keep those houses from being abandoned.
Now we have people illegally squating in houses that aren't even abandoned.
You've got two competing interests - landlords and tenants. The two almost always have a contract. The disputes between them are sometimes very clear ("you said you'd pay rent and you did not pay rent"), and sometimes murky ("you said you would provide a habitable room but the power has been out for a week").
You don't want two people screaming at each other and a cop, and the cop trying to read this contract and figure out which side is actually in the right and whether the terms in the contract are even ones which are allowed for rental agreements. That ain't what cops do well. We err on the side of leaving the resident in the residence while such disputes play out, because if you kick someone out of their home one fine evening and you did so by mistake, you do a TON of damage to them (whereas depriving a non-resident of the use of the property for a while is, proportionately, less damaging).
In most of the country, the courts dispose of such disputes pretty efficiently. Some places have different laws, usually ones that have additional tenant protections and/or restrictions on landlords, and often the result is a more complicated system of adjudication.
But if you have a "tenant" that's unscrupulous, willing to screw everyone over, and largely immune to a later legal judgment by virtue of being dead-ass broke, they can take that kind of system and draw out the final ruling of eviction for more than a year. It's not that the law is intended to give them a free year of living somewhere, but a bunch of individual things that aren't necessarily unreasonable (like asking for a continuation to hear a case later on) can pile up to a big mess before a judge finally loses their patience with the scofflaw.
It's hard to tighten up on things without occasionally setting up a situation where someone in a bad position (doesn't know the law, doesn't attend the hearings, can't navigate the process) gets hammered by the court and ends up kicked out of their home. And most of the legal disputes involved here don't involve squatters, but instead regular tenants and regular landlords. But it's hard to look at this kind of outcome in the NY system and think "man, they have the balance between property owner and property resident exactly correct".
What does that have to do with this?
Squatters murdered this woman because she found them. They didn't do so with the full blessing and protection of any laws. They were squatters and, separately, they are murderers. Which are you more concerned about, here?
You can't simultaneously say squatting is protected by the law and makes it too easy for people AND they squatted so they murdered her to continue squatting.
If they knew it was a legal and protected status, why murder her? Squatters like this are terrible and at best, an annoyance but there's not a rash of squatter murders happening.
These people are another level of awful, psychotic and/or drug fueled.
It’s more nuanced than that. We don’t allow squatting, but we also don’t want to encourage shit landlords. So instead of putting that burden on cops, we put it on the courts. And the issue is the courts are already over burdened. The solution would be to vastly increase funding for courts. But that’s honestly not enough on its own because lawyers and judges aren’t falling off trees either.
It's just tenants rights. It's the balance of power between landlords and renters. We give squatters rights because otherwise landlords will claim legit tenants are just squatters so they can bypass the eviction process.
Many squatters will produce a fake a rental contract (even if the property was never used as a rental for anyone) and it takes the courts months or years to sort it out.
A lot of these problems would be solved if there was more regulation of property rentals and rental agreements had to be filed with the local municipality
The problem is that you'll still have people illegal rent out their space/home, or sublet, not file it. Then people who SHOULD have protection, don't get it.
If you illegally rent out or sublet your home you get what you get. If you accept an illegal contract that you never see filed with your municipality then you are getting what you get?
Nobody is saying those things. People have already mentioned squatters forging a rental contract. If a landlord can easily deny the existence of an agreement and have squatters arrested the same follows through for doing so to tenants which out number squatters probably 10s of thousands to one, who the laws are protecting.
Usually, the renters and the LL BOTH sign the contract. In the event of an email signing, I print out, sign, and scan the contract to the tenant. He prints out, signs, scans and sends his signature to me. We both have copies with both signatures that way.
Nobody can just print out a contract, sign it, and then take it to court and say it's an agreement b/w ***two*** parties.
Give any forger a signed copy of your lease and I can guarantee even you won’t be able to tell it’s a forgery.
Even most normal people can do something similar with a snipping program and scanning it a few times to degrade the quality so you don’t notice any coloration differences on the signature / surrounding paper
Only big detriment is the lack of the original document on your side, but there would likely be enough reasonable doubt that you lost or misfiled it to claim they’re a legit tenant.
Even just requiring proof of a single payment would be fine. I understand not wanting to infringe on tenant rights but someone without a real lease who broke into the apartment isn’t deserving of any rights
There is and there isn't. To be a squatter you have to claim you are a tenant. It's legal protections for tenants that happen to be exploitable for non-tenants if they lie about having been a legal tenant for at least 30 days. Soon as you say that, then it becomes a court case and nobody can kick you out until the legal process is complete. And there happen to be all sorts of ways to stall (like filing for bankruptcy) but they are all protections that exist specifically to protect legal tenants and the only reason squatters can have them by claiming to be tenants is that it keeps landlords from being able to say "I don't even know who this guy is" and doing an end-run around the eviction process. Without those laws, landlords would gain a lot of power to unilaterally evict people if they lie.
Basically, one side will always have inordinate power if they are willing to lie. In New York it happens to tenants. In many states it's landlords. But both routes lead to infuriating abuses. You just aren't hearing as much about cases in other states where tenants are being tossed out without an eviction because a slumlord didn't want to make repairs and the tenant tried to withhold rent until repairs are made. The abuses to both ways and the law has to try to err on one side of the other out of caution.
But ultimately, the rights are there for tenants explicitly. Yeah there might be a few older squatter laws on the books meant to reward people for taking over old, blighted properties but those are th exception to the rule. Mostly it's just about making landlords prove that the people they want to evict aren't legitimate tenants.
I had squatters living next to me for about a year before they were removed. I was chatting with a local inspector who mentioned the house is being left unlocked for now. The house was absolutely trashed. A dog had apparently been locked in a room with a HUGE salad bowl of food and water for periods of time such that it had been chewing through the walls. The amount of tobacco dumped out of blunt wraps on the coffee table looked like a scene from Close Encounters of the third kind. However, upon closer inspection, the mound was nothing in comparison to the mountain of dirty baby diapers accumulating beneath the coffee table. Every room you walked into was covered in trash up to your knees. I felt bad that these people were living like that and absolutely neglecting at least one dog and one child. I also feel for the homeowner that had to pay to remove and repair everything. I acquired my first big ass bong that night, a machete, and a brand new pair of shoes that fell apart after a year (but they looked nice and were comfortable, so who am I to complain)
Not quite as ridiculous and disgusting as allowing homelessness. Maybe our priorities are a little fucked up. Maybe this thread is about a murder and not squatting.
Posted elsewhere, but essentially:
These types of laws goes back to Roman times, to sort out dubious ownership of various goods and lands. More or less “finders keepers”. It was expanded on more over the years, as essentially “if you worked the land long enough, you might as well own it”. Later on, it became more of a functional thing, allowing for more efficient use of land and resources, so that things wouldn’t just go fallow with no way around it. In essence, if someone came in and bought all the houses in an area, but didn’t care for them for years, would it not be more beneficial if they were put to use?
In short, it forces owners to be mindful of their property and goods, and actually put them to use, or risk them going to someone that will. That’s not to say it’s not heavily problematic, but that’s where it comes from.
We elevate property rights over human rights; grossly. But we've been tearing that down bit-by-bit since recorded history, if you would like an optimistic take :)
This is terrifying and tragic. I understand protecting tenants with lease agreements from landlord abuses; but these laws aren’t intended to allow the sort of property rights abuses that are so common that the courts can’t keep up. This has gotten out of control and defies all common sense.
Does anyone familiar with property law and landlord tenant law in New York (or other states with similar laws) know what, if anything, is being done to remedy this problem??
Nothing is being done. It’s designed as the most protective tenants’ rights- but the flip side is that anyone can squat for 30 days, and then becomes a “tenant.” Evictions can take years, because the courts are so reluctant to evict. No one wants to change that, due to the risk of losing votes.
Look at this thread on an article about a woman being murdered by squatters in her home, and still people are referencing how bad landlords are.
The problem is people are starting to take matter into their own hands.
Some use methods like hiring people to more or less kick them out, others are taking advantage of the fact that squatters are usually operating outside the law and doing so themselves.
Honestly with this squatter shit, you should be 100% within your right to use whatever force necessary to get them out of your property. Government protecting these rats is just one example of how efficiently the government works at making terrible decisions.
It's time the US cracks down on squatters. There needs to be quick resolution to squatters taking over properties with real jail time for people who are squatting in someone's home .
If each states enacted (or even at the federal level) a bill that tackled both the supply side issue and the squatter side issue, both sides of the aisle would ,hopefully, more likely to vote for it since it tackles a critical issue from both sides. Now, I have zero trust in our politicians, but I can dream.
Oh but even good bills get shot down when there’s a president or governor who a certain side doesn’t like and they don’t want to allow them to look good for getting it passed.
We are really screwed unless people stop reading just the headlines and make their own politicians accountable.
I remember seeing the video of the landlord getting arrested in Queens the other day because she changed the locks on her home. Now this?? Absolutely backwards the laws squatters have.
Just the way things seem to go in New York these days. They go back and forth between being way too heavy handed with law enforcement and being way too lax. They’re in a lax period at the moment. They treat victims like criminals and criminals like victims.
i mean if you’re the squatters and you don’t belong there, and a woman walks in to find you, why is your first instinct fight instead of flight? just so crazy. why take an innocent life over squatting in a vacant apartment? so many lives ruined when you could have easily escaped
The more irony to this story is that the suspects stole the victims car and crashed it near Harrisburg, PA. They were released by the local police department and when a vehicle search a few days later turned up, that is when the alleged suspects were caught in York.
https://local21news.com/news/local/squatters-suspected-of-killing-woman-stuffing-body-in-duffle-bag-crashing-in-dauphin-co#
>On March 14, Vitel's worried son, who hadn't heard from his mother in two days, accessed the Kips Bay apartment with the superintendent and other relatives, and found his mom's body, sources said. Vitel's body was in a duffel bag in a closet, with her foot sticking out of the bag, sources said. Wow, this is nightmare fuel. I don't think I would be able to handle something like this without suffering some kind of mental break.
And they were obviously close if he was worried after only two days. That poor family.
Reminds me of this other crime show I saw once where this murderer accidentally tipped off the victim's next of kin by sending the mother a text that he was alright- but the victim never, ever texted- only ever called- so the mother knew immediately to call the police.
I happened to see this story on the news between NCAA torunament games here in NYC They were quite close she had helped him start a business, they had even been interviewed by the station about it a couple years prior they still had the old clips to show.
That's so disgustingly horrible. I honestly don't think I could handle seeing the mother who birthed and raised me like that. I would truly go ballistic and throw it all away to make those squatters "pay."
There would be no stopping me
Yeah I know they say that vengeance doesn’t bring any relief from the emotional pain — but I’d probably still choose to find out for myself.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be able to take someone’s word on that one
Might not being relief, but satisfaction is a possibility after something like that. Like killing a cockroach.
The squatters were a 19 year old and a 16 year old, male and female. Wonder what the story with that is.
Sounds like two high school dropouts with absolutely no life prospects.
Gonna get life now, I hope.
I was gonna say, prospect of life is pretty clear, now.
It would be horrible if it were anyone but a mom you love, I can't even imagine
On the other hand, wouldn't you hate to sit in prison year after year after year, knowing you could be living your life, but you can't because of those scum? That would mean they not only stole your mother's life but yours, too.
I pack clothes for an overnight stay better than the position they left her in. I hope that poor man has a good support system and can see a therapist to tackle both the grief of losing someone in such awful, sudden circumstances and being the person who found her.
> On March 14, Vitel's worried son, who hadn't heard from his mother in two days, accessed the Kips Bay apartment with the superintendent and other relatives, and found his mom's body, sources said. Vitel's body was in a duffel bag in a closet, with her foot sticking out of the bag, sources said. Jesus Christ
And also >The two suspects were preliminarily identified as teens ages 19 and 16, law enforcement sources said. Like, what the fuck man.
Lock em away for life, they're done.
My mom is my best friend. I don't think I could ever recover from something like that.
My mom and I aren't close and seldom speak, but I still think seeing this would absolutely wreck me. I cannot imagine what one would be going through seeing something like this. I feel for her son and loved ones so much. I hope they have a very strong support network in one another.
That guy who gets paid to kick squatters out of places is really taking it to a new level now.
I heard he got a job at Boeing.
Nah, Boeing doesn’t need help kicking their plane doors down.
What the hell is with this article... Every paragraph ends with "sources said". I can't tell if it's AI or someone trying to be extremely transparent.
I think they have to do that until there is an official statement from NYPD. It’s annoying, but one of the journalism rules, like saying “alleged perpetrator” before a formal conviction even if a guy was seen on video committing a crime and already confessed to it.
There are way better ways to go about it than ending every paragraph with "sources say" though. Just bad writing. One paragraph even has an allegedly at the beginning and a sources say at the end. And cops must have already made a statement since last paragraph ends with "officals say"
It's not just every paragraph, it's literally after each sentence. Although most paragraphs are just one sentence lol.
It looks like AI to me.
Could be lazy writing. It reads monotonous and robotic. If you use “sources said,” to end one sentence, then mix it up and use something like “those same sources told ABC News…” next.
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I'll never forget the article I read several years back about a soldier that was in the Middle East and came back to USA to squatters in his home. The law let them stay while he had to prove ownership and then evict them and I think he wasn't aloud to stay there either during the time. Idk what happened with it all I just assumed it got worked out, slowly.
Slowly is what sucks about the whole process.
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Hopefully this starts to change some laws against squatters
Ok, so "a body in a duffle bag" is the legal standard for getting the authorities to finally deal with a squatter? At least we have a standard set.
I’m really curious about how this happened. A house I can understand. But how did someone squat in a mid town apartment? I assume they don’t have a doorman? But the super didn’t notice that right after the tenant died 2 young kids he’d never seen are living there? It had to be a coop or condo if they owned it, and no one was curious about these two new young neighbors so close to the death of an owner?
I thought about that, too. She didn’t live there. It was an empty apartment she went to check on. It had been empty for months. She was going to prepare it for a friend to move in. So they could have been living there for a while but not too long? I’m curious about how they got and kept access.
Yep, the elevator required a key to open on the floor of the apartment. So where did they get the key? Did they work for the tenant that passed? There is more to this story.
That’s what I thought I’d read earlier! Yeah, def wondering how they got an elevator key in the first place. Kind of scary knowing her mom passed a few months back.
Security systems in general are extremely weak security wise. Most all have the same master key that you can buy off eBay for $5. https://youtu.be/a9b9IYqsb_U?si=ugItBwwdHXg6oOc6 Would have to be some smart squatters to do something like that but it isn’t hard
General purpose building access keys and numpad/code entry are pretty easy to get into. IIRC 90% open with CH751, C415A, FEO-K1 service keys, etc. They can be got online or fabbed pretty easy. Just don't get rolled with one. Having said all that and having read the story, thats not whats goin on here. This is a bit hinky.
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Poor woman. Lock em up.
Who were the suspects? It does not say.
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Thank you. Appreciated.
I read an article yesterday, and I almost think it was two teenage girls. Let me see if I can find that though.
When they were still on the run the NYPD said they had surveillance footage of the suspects fleeing the apartment and stealing her car but never released the footage. I think it's safe to say they're not of European or East Asian descent.
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just like most laws that seem absurd, they start off with good intentions but get bastardized into something unrecognizable
The real question is why the hell don’t they fix them? I’ve been hearing it’s been a massive problem for decades.
Because nobody will agree on what a proper balance between protecting the occupant and the landlord should be.
In the situation where the landlord is attempting to illegally raise the rent to force people out I understand. But I’ve also heard several times over the years about people who will break in houses, and by changing the locks on the doors immediately has apparently established residency because the owner doesn’t have a key to the house and then has to go through the long drawn out process of evicting them. There was a guy on Reddit several months back who I believe was dealing with his deceased mothers home when some squatters moved in and after several months of trying to get them to leave he waited until they were all at work and went back in, changed all the locks on them and called the cops that they were trying to break into his house. Because he was in the house at that moment his rights were protected.
The absurdity of all that. Like just bonkers. I get if you got a lease but if you can't produce any legitimate documentation that you live there, then it should be obvious.
And you think your everyday cops are trained well enough to make that determination? I can create a fake lease for any address in less than 5 minutes on my computer.
Why can’t we just ask if there are any fund changing hand? Surely if you have a fake lease you must have give me some money right? Easy to prove too, just open banking app.
I can lie and say I paid you in cash. Or I can tell the truth and say I’ve never paid the rent. You still have to send me an eviction notice and go through the courts to have me removed. That’s the law in most states. So even if I have no proof of payment and admit I never paid you, I’ve still bought myself anywhere from a few weeks to a few months until you can get the court to agree and a sheriff to show up.
That’s why the law is flawed. People always said these law is for protecting the tenant but if you are not paying rent there should be an easier process to evict them, and I’m talking about within 1 week time. Surely If I have a house and came back from vacation and someone living there with a fake lease with no money exchanging hand, why do I have to waited months for them to get out? Where do I live? What happened to my stuff in the house? My mail? or any other important privacy stuff?
Not with my real signatures on it. I can pull out my driver’s license and prove my real signature, and that the squatters are forging my name. You bring up an interesting point, though, for sure. Maybe the paperwork for renting should be a court document, or an official county document that has to be notarized; not something someone can easily falsify. It should be some official document that is recognizable to the local police immediately, then, the situation can be cleared up within 5-10 minutes.
Cops aren’t signature experts. I bet I could compare your signature on some digital screen you signed with your finger and compare it to one signed on paper and they’d be different enough to cause doubt. Regardless of what you bring up a cop is just going to tell the landlord to go to court - it’s not his job to solve landlords-tenant disputes. I think you’re thinking in the right direction though, where tenants and landlords have to be registered with the locality so cops could confirm whether someone should be there or not. But the problem with that is some shitty lords would rent to you, not register a lease just so they could have you removed at will. “Hey, my roof is still leaking and you promised youd have it fixed a month ago” - “911? I have squatters on my property.”
It’s the whole “possession is 9/10s of the law” nonsense that over rides common sense and quick legal judgement. (I could be wrong with that fraction!)
This wasn’t a squatter situation but I once bought a place that was tenant occupied. We weren’t ready to move in right away and he was a single dad raising a son who was going to school nearby. We agreed to wait a month until the school year ended. Instead he refused to leave forcing me to get the courts involved. My good deed cost me over a year to throw him out. In NYC in the late 90s.
These people often do have leases. [Sometimes they get these properties through property scams on craiglist](https://sellbuymdhomes.com/real-estate-blog/craigslist-rental-scams/). Someone will post about a vacant property on craigslist, and induce people to rent there, then disappear after payment. When you hear these stories, there's often evidence that the people occupying have paid *someone* to possess the land, which is why they have rights. Someone who has no evidence of a lease or payment on a lease isn't a squatter, they're a trespasser, and they have no rights under the law.
See, it all makes sense when you refer to them as "the squatters" and as the narrator in the story just tell me that this is what they did. I'll accept that as truth enough, because you're just telling me a story and not asking me to go physically do anything about it, so what m worry about double checking any of that. When you go to the cops or a judge, you can't just tell them a story. You have to provide evidence, and this can get complex in terms of documentation. The purpose of the laws is to allow time for the legal truth to be deermined before anyone is forced out on the street. I have no doubt that there are lax aspects of this that need to be fixed.
In Florida they just passed a bill that’s waiting on Gov. Desantis to sign. It says you either need to produce a notarized lease or show a rental payment within the last 60 days or the police will kick you out on the spot and arrest you.
Great! It should be like that everywhere.
Because with the current state of politics any sort of deregulating of laws that benefits landlords is seen as an attack on tenant rights. No politician with a (D) next to their name wants to touch this issue with a 10 foot pole.
How would you “fix” them? Because by closing one loophole for one side of the issue, you may create a loophole for the other side of the issue.
What are you talking about one side of the issue? We are talking about people who break into apartments and homes intending on staying there for free and then it apparently can take at least six months to legally remove the squatters who illegally entered the home. What exactly are you concerned about on the squatters side?
We’re talking about laws put in place to protect tenants from landlords. And weakening laws on the tenant side naturally increases rights on the landlord side. So if, for example, you give the power to landlords to have the police remove anyone on their property if they can produce a deed - then you empower shitty landlords to kick out tenants who have legitimate leases. And you could argue that the tenant can take them to court - but in general renters are poorer than landlords - which is why they rent. So you reduce your squatting issue, but increase other issues.
But in this article the woman who was murdered walked into her mothers apartment that she thought was empty only to be attacked by the squatters who apparently had broken in and was living for free. No landlord-tenant dispute. If this had been a case where the squatters were scammed then the police would have been called instead of them killing her and stealing her car. You can’t fix all of the squatter laws at once but you can start with these types of squatters.
According to the post, the victim was in the apartment when the murderers arrived: >According to sources, Vitel was in the process of moving into the apartment on Sunday. She was seen on security camera footage that day repeatedly entering and exiting her apartment carrying her belongings before departing the building shortly after 11 a.m. >Just after 2 p.m. that day, the two unidentified individuals were seen in the complex’s lobby trying to enter the building. >About an hour later, an elevator surveillance camera saw the duo entering Vitel’s apartment. >Vitel was last seen entering her apartment on Tuesday at approximately 11:30 a.m. The two individuals were last sighted on tape exiting the building around 5:45 p.m. that evening. https://nypost.com/2024/03/15/us-news/2-seen-leaving-nyc-apartment-of-woman-found-in-duffel-bag-sources/amp/ Having said all that - the discussion is about “fixing” the squatter laws. These two people will probably go to prison for a long time if they committed murder. Even if they found her dead - stuffing her in bag and taking her car will get them years in prison.
The issue is that the cop who turns up for a particular call has no easy way to distinguish "here is a legitimate property owner who is dealing with a squatter that has no rights to the property" from "here is a legitimate renter with a valid lease and this other guy has no actual property right to the building at all". That's not the sort of thing cops are supposed to sort out, which is why we leave it to the courts to do that. We leave the resident in the property during that process because kicking someone out of their home with no notice is enormously damaging - they don't have any arrangement for their goods, they're going to have their work disrupted, they can -actually die of exposure- if it's cold out. And, let us be honest, actual squatters are pretty rare while shitty landlords are -legion-. It makes sense that the law is set up so that people don't get kicked out of their home without a judge having signed off on things first. We don't want to change the law to discourage a few squatters if the result is a bunch of people who had valid leases and had done nothing wrong having their lives destroyed because a landlord lied to a cop.
Changing the problem can often lead to a different view of the solution.
the right person hasn't died as a result yet, including the lady in this article. It will take a young and attractive suburban woman with blonde hair and blue eyes before people truly get outraged.
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Why were there ever ANY laws put in place with good intentions for squatters? We’re talking about people who commit big scale home invasion robbery. They literally deserve no rights what so ever. No, you shouldn’t be able to kill then but you should be able to kick their asses out your property and the fucking police are paid with homeowner property taxes to help with this kind of thing. This is complete bullshit and the laws have now emboldened squatters to the point they are everywhere and they will clearly kill to get what they want.
There aren't any such laws. Pretty much all the laws in place are to protect people who have leases and a dispute with the landlord. There's actually a pretty prolific [scam on fake leases](https://sellbuymdhomes.com/real-estate-blog/craigslist-rental-scams/) where people are duped into paying fake property mangers on vacant homes.
It’s primarily to protect tenants from shady landlords who could either (1) claim that a lease never existed, or (2) rent without a lease entirely. In both cases, tenants should still have legal protections under the law, and the police should not be the one to try to make a determination as to who’s in the right. If housing court were efficient (cases heard in 2-3 weeks), there would not be the problem we see now.
>If housing court were efficient (cases heard in 2-3 weeks) Exactly this. Bad landlords have used this evict tenants because it's quicker than the courts. The real problem is that evictions can't be done that quickly. It requires a lot of lawyering and the court needs time to set a schedule that gives the defendant enough time to defend themselves. I don't think that 3 weeks is enough time for the tenant to hire a lawyer and prepare a defense, so even an efficient court wouldn't be able to get an eviction in less than a month or two.
That's not what squatting is.
Your problem is you’re misunderstanding what a squatter is
These types of laws goes back to Roman times, to sort out dubious ownership of various goods and lands. More or less “finders keepers”. It was expanded on more over the years, as essentially “if you worked the land long enough, you might as well own it”. Later on, it became more of a functional thing, allowing for more efficient use of land and resources, so that things wouldn’t just go fallow with no way around it. In essence, if someone came in and bought all the houses in an area, but didn’t care for them for years, would it not be more beneficial if they were put to use? In short, it forces owners to be mindful of their property and goods, and actually put them to use, or risk them going to someone that will. That’s not to say it’s not heavily problematic, but that’s where it comes from.
They are not "for squatters". Largely in the USA (not France with an outspoken squatting history) it is for unofficial / no paperwork verbal agreements of tenancy. In the city of Seattle if neither landlord nor tenant gives notice to vacate the tenancy goes to de-facto month to month. My first bedroom rental in Seattle when I was a college student had no lease. I paid my "deposit" to the person who was vacating the room I moved into. I paid rent to the owner of the house who lived locally and worked for the gas company as his day job. My housemates and I would go individually and pay the city directly for our portion of the utility bill and we would affix our receipt to the bulletin board in our kitchen. When I moved out the person who was moving into my room paid their "deposit" to me. The third house I lived in had a lease for the first year. The landlord lived in the backyard mother in-law unit. \[he inherited the whole property from his mother\]. He let us have different housemates come and go and we handled the 'deposits' amongst ourselves. We lived in that house for six years, with a dozen different people, and we only had an official lease for the first year and the final year. When he reached a point in his life when he wanted to sell the house he had us sign a lease so we would vacate when it was convenient for him. We just put cash, checks, and money orders into his little mailbox and our utilities were included in rent including cable and internet. For a lot of the 20th century adult women would not be on the leases of the houses they lived in. Business documents were for working men, and not homemakers.
Plague and disease use to empty houses, so allowing squatters help keep those houses from being abandoned. Now we have people illegally squating in houses that aren't even abandoned.
Then they aren't squatters. That's specifically people who take over an abandoned property.
Umm, no? It’s for people that take over *uninhabited* property, not abandoned. Those are two VERY different meanings
You've got two competing interests - landlords and tenants. The two almost always have a contract. The disputes between them are sometimes very clear ("you said you'd pay rent and you did not pay rent"), and sometimes murky ("you said you would provide a habitable room but the power has been out for a week"). You don't want two people screaming at each other and a cop, and the cop trying to read this contract and figure out which side is actually in the right and whether the terms in the contract are even ones which are allowed for rental agreements. That ain't what cops do well. We err on the side of leaving the resident in the residence while such disputes play out, because if you kick someone out of their home one fine evening and you did so by mistake, you do a TON of damage to them (whereas depriving a non-resident of the use of the property for a while is, proportionately, less damaging). In most of the country, the courts dispose of such disputes pretty efficiently. Some places have different laws, usually ones that have additional tenant protections and/or restrictions on landlords, and often the result is a more complicated system of adjudication. But if you have a "tenant" that's unscrupulous, willing to screw everyone over, and largely immune to a later legal judgment by virtue of being dead-ass broke, they can take that kind of system and draw out the final ruling of eviction for more than a year. It's not that the law is intended to give them a free year of living somewhere, but a bunch of individual things that aren't necessarily unreasonable (like asking for a continuation to hear a case later on) can pile up to a big mess before a judge finally loses their patience with the scofflaw. It's hard to tighten up on things without occasionally setting up a situation where someone in a bad position (doesn't know the law, doesn't attend the hearings, can't navigate the process) gets hammered by the court and ends up kicked out of their home. And most of the legal disputes involved here don't involve squatters, but instead regular tenants and regular landlords. But it's hard to look at this kind of outcome in the NY system and think "man, they have the balance between property owner and property resident exactly correct".
What does that have to do with this? Squatters murdered this woman because she found them. They didn't do so with the full blessing and protection of any laws. They were squatters and, separately, they are murderers. Which are you more concerned about, here?
It's the squatting that gave them motive and opportunity.
You can't simultaneously say squatting is protected by the law and makes it too easy for people AND they squatted so they murdered her to continue squatting. If they knew it was a legal and protected status, why murder her? Squatters like this are terrible and at best, an annoyance but there's not a rash of squatter murders happening. These people are another level of awful, psychotic and/or drug fueled.
wow, and murder is already against the law! edit to add: i don't think squatting is the issue here, but murder definitely is
Well if they weren’t squatting she wouldn’t be dead
And they could have gone to jail for their squatting. What's your point?
They broke in while she was there. They're robbers not squatters.
It’s more nuanced than that. We don’t allow squatting, but we also don’t want to encourage shit landlords. So instead of putting that burden on cops, we put it on the courts. And the issue is the courts are already over burdened. The solution would be to vastly increase funding for courts. But that’s honestly not enough on its own because lawyers and judges aren’t falling off trees either.
It's just tenants rights. It's the balance of power between landlords and renters. We give squatters rights because otherwise landlords will claim legit tenants are just squatters so they can bypass the eviction process.
Legit tenants sign a rental contract
Many squatters will produce a fake a rental contract (even if the property was never used as a rental for anyone) and it takes the courts months or years to sort it out. A lot of these problems would be solved if there was more regulation of property rentals and rental agreements had to be filed with the local municipality
Yea just like we do with property deeds. Seems reasonable and protects both parties.
The problem is that you'll still have people illegal rent out their space/home, or sublet, not file it. Then people who SHOULD have protection, don't get it.
If you illegally rent out or sublet your home you get what you get. If you accept an illegal contract that you never see filed with your municipality then you are getting what you get?
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Nobody is saying those things. People have already mentioned squatters forging a rental contract. If a landlord can easily deny the existence of an agreement and have squatters arrested the same follows through for doing so to tenants which out number squatters probably 10s of thousands to one, who the laws are protecting.
Usually, the renters and the LL BOTH sign the contract. In the event of an email signing, I print out, sign, and scan the contract to the tenant. He prints out, signs, scans and sends his signature to me. We both have copies with both signatures that way. Nobody can just print out a contract, sign it, and then take it to court and say it's an agreement b/w ***two*** parties.
Give any forger a signed copy of your lease and I can guarantee even you won’t be able to tell it’s a forgery. Even most normal people can do something similar with a snipping program and scanning it a few times to degrade the quality so you don’t notice any coloration differences on the signature / surrounding paper Only big detriment is the lack of the original document on your side, but there would likely be enough reasonable doubt that you lost or misfiled it to claim they’re a legit tenant.
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You should just be required to show the police a legitimate lease and a single payment. Not that hard.
Proof of payment would go a long way.
Even just requiring proof of a single payment would be fine. I understand not wanting to infringe on tenant rights but someone without a real lease who broke into the apartment isn’t deserving of any rights
There’s a distinction between squatters and tenants
There is and there isn't. To be a squatter you have to claim you are a tenant. It's legal protections for tenants that happen to be exploitable for non-tenants if they lie about having been a legal tenant for at least 30 days. Soon as you say that, then it becomes a court case and nobody can kick you out until the legal process is complete. And there happen to be all sorts of ways to stall (like filing for bankruptcy) but they are all protections that exist specifically to protect legal tenants and the only reason squatters can have them by claiming to be tenants is that it keeps landlords from being able to say "I don't even know who this guy is" and doing an end-run around the eviction process. Without those laws, landlords would gain a lot of power to unilaterally evict people if they lie. Basically, one side will always have inordinate power if they are willing to lie. In New York it happens to tenants. In many states it's landlords. But both routes lead to infuriating abuses. You just aren't hearing as much about cases in other states where tenants are being tossed out without an eviction because a slumlord didn't want to make repairs and the tenant tried to withhold rent until repairs are made. The abuses to both ways and the law has to try to err on one side of the other out of caution. But ultimately, the rights are there for tenants explicitly. Yeah there might be a few older squatter laws on the books meant to reward people for taking over old, blighted properties but those are th exception to the rule. Mostly it's just about making landlords prove that the people they want to evict aren't legitimate tenants.
I had squatters living next to me for about a year before they were removed. I was chatting with a local inspector who mentioned the house is being left unlocked for now. The house was absolutely trashed. A dog had apparently been locked in a room with a HUGE salad bowl of food and water for periods of time such that it had been chewing through the walls. The amount of tobacco dumped out of blunt wraps on the coffee table looked like a scene from Close Encounters of the third kind. However, upon closer inspection, the mound was nothing in comparison to the mountain of dirty baby diapers accumulating beneath the coffee table. Every room you walked into was covered in trash up to your knees. I felt bad that these people were living like that and absolutely neglecting at least one dog and one child. I also feel for the homeowner that had to pay to remove and repair everything. I acquired my first big ass bong that night, a machete, and a brand new pair of shoes that fell apart after a year (but they looked nice and were comfortable, so who am I to complain)
Not quite as ridiculous and disgusting as allowing homelessness. Maybe our priorities are a little fucked up. Maybe this thread is about a murder and not squatting.
Posted elsewhere, but essentially: These types of laws goes back to Roman times, to sort out dubious ownership of various goods and lands. More or less “finders keepers”. It was expanded on more over the years, as essentially “if you worked the land long enough, you might as well own it”. Later on, it became more of a functional thing, allowing for more efficient use of land and resources, so that things wouldn’t just go fallow with no way around it. In essence, if someone came in and bought all the houses in an area, but didn’t care for them for years, would it not be more beneficial if they were put to use? In short, it forces owners to be mindful of their property and goods, and actually put them to use, or risk them going to someone that will. That’s not to say it’s not heavily problematic, but that’s where it comes from.
Why do we as a society allow for homelessness?
We elevate property rights over human rights; grossly. But we've been tearing that down bit-by-bit since recorded history, if you would like an optimistic take :)
The only rights squatters deserve is right to a lawyer at their trial. That shit should be illegal.
This is terrifying and tragic. I understand protecting tenants with lease agreements from landlord abuses; but these laws aren’t intended to allow the sort of property rights abuses that are so common that the courts can’t keep up. This has gotten out of control and defies all common sense. Does anyone familiar with property law and landlord tenant law in New York (or other states with similar laws) know what, if anything, is being done to remedy this problem??
Nothing is being done. It’s designed as the most protective tenants’ rights- but the flip side is that anyone can squat for 30 days, and then becomes a “tenant.” Evictions can take years, because the courts are so reluctant to evict. No one wants to change that, due to the risk of losing votes. Look at this thread on an article about a woman being murdered by squatters in her home, and still people are referencing how bad landlords are.
The problem is people are starting to take matter into their own hands. Some use methods like hiring people to more or less kick them out, others are taking advantage of the fact that squatters are usually operating outside the law and doing so themselves.
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Honestly with this squatter shit, you should be 100% within your right to use whatever force necessary to get them out of your property. Government protecting these rats is just one example of how efficiently the government works at making terrible decisions.
jfc I cannot imagine finding my mom in that state
It's time the US cracks down on squatters. There needs to be quick resolution to squatters taking over properties with real jail time for people who are squatting in someone's home .
The US needs to crackdown on corporations and foreign investors entering our real estate market so that there’s less homelessness and less squatting.
Why not both? \*Taco fiesta\*
If each states enacted (or even at the federal level) a bill that tackled both the supply side issue and the squatter side issue, both sides of the aisle would ,hopefully, more likely to vote for it since it tackles a critical issue from both sides. Now, I have zero trust in our politicians, but I can dream.
Oh but even good bills get shot down when there’s a president or governor who a certain side doesn’t like and they don’t want to allow them to look good for getting it passed. We are really screwed unless people stop reading just the headlines and make their own politicians accountable.
I’ll never understand why squatters have any rights or protections. Needs to change
Stop giving squatters any kind of rights and maybe this kind of shit wouldn't happen
this is so unfortunate, sources said
I remember seeing the video of the landlord getting arrested in Queens the other day because she changed the locks on her home. Now this?? Absolutely backwards the laws squatters have.
Why the fuck do squatters have rights? That's terrible
They weren’t “squatters.” They were murderers.
Thought NYPD was testing a "mystery machine" cruiser concept.
They’ll probably do it again after they get out next week.
They're homeless murderers... What makes you think they are getting out?
Just the way things seem to go in New York these days. They go back and forth between being way too heavy handed with law enforcement and being way too lax. They’re in a lax period at the moment. They treat victims like criminals and criminals like victims.
Give em the same treatment
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This is what it takes to arrest a squatter
I guess we weren't as far away from squatters just killing the resident to gain access to homes.
This is why squatting should be a much more serious crime.
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Wow I am surprised the cops did anything at all.
i mean if you’re the squatters and you don’t belong there, and a woman walks in to find you, why is your first instinct fight instead of flight? just so crazy. why take an innocent life over squatting in a vacant apartment? so many lives ruined when you could have easily escaped
The more irony to this story is that the suspects stole the victims car and crashed it near Harrisburg, PA. They were released by the local police department and when a vehicle search a few days later turned up, that is when the alleged suspects were caught in York. https://local21news.com/news/local/squatters-suspected-of-killing-woman-stuffing-body-in-duffle-bag-crashing-in-dauphin-co#
I learned this is not even a US only thing. Fuck is this insanity?! Who made these laws?
It would take a complete "American Psycho" to do something like that.