An Arkansas family discovered a complete stranger living in the basement of their home after noticing missing items and moved furniture.
Dutch Hoggatt, a professor at Harding University, said he first became suspicious when his shoes, which he left daily at the back door of their Searcy home, suddenly disappeared.
“I asked my wife if she had gotten rid of them, and she hadn’t,” Hoggart said He told KHTV. “Over time, we noticed that chairs had been moved around the house. We noticed that some of our food was missing.”
Hoggart’s daughter, Cherise Gregory, her husband, Mark, and Hoggart’s wife, Sharon – armed with a baseball bat and a shotgun – decided to search the house on Wednesday, April 29.
When Sharon entered a storage area under the basement stairs, she was horrified to find someone there.
“She went inside the closet, and that’s when I saw her eyes really get big,” Mark recalls. “She started to back away, and she said, ‘There’s someone over there. “I see his leg, or his jeans, or something.”
Mark demanded that the man with a bat in his hand come out.
“I start banging on the door, or the frame, just to scare him a little bit,” Mark said. “And eventually he says, ‘Okay, I’m coming, I’m coming.’”
The family called the police, and the man, identified as 41-year-old Preston Landis, was immediately arrested.
He had been living at Hoggatt’s home for several days, according to police.
He spent the night of Monday, April 27, in the family’s crawl space before moving into the unlocked basement the next day while the couple was out of the house.
He had fixed himself a makeshift bed in the depths of a storage closet there.
However, the family said there were no hard feelings and expressed sympathy.
“We’re not mad at this guy,” Hoggatt said.
“I feel sorry for the guy. I’m glad we found out there was someone living in the house, because this could have gone on for a lot longer than it did.”
Mark added: “There were so many chances he could have taken. It seemed like he was just trying to get out of the elements, trying to survive.”
Landis is charged with residential burglary and theft of property. He is being held on $15,000 bail.