I looked to my side.
And I saw both cats just staring at me, which
really scared me because that meant there
was something under the bed.
At first, my wife didn't hear the noise.
She thought I was overreacting.
And then she heard the noise.
[snoring sound]
After she heard the noise, we get out of that room.
And she slammed the door.
[door slams]
We thought it was an animal that was under the bed.
So we were trying to figure out what to do next.
Should we call animal control?
Or should we call the police again?
We didn't know what to do.
We finally decided to call the police again.
We told the dispatcher we thought there
was an animal under our bed.
And she told us to leave the house immediately.
So we left.
Brian gets freaked out.
He manages to convince his wife to leave.
They slam the door.
They realize they've left Gizmo, their cat,
inside there with God knows what.
BRIAN O'NEILL: My wife bravely went in and scooped him up
and saved him.
And they decide to wait for the cops outside
of the building.
The cops arrive within minutes, the same cops,
the same two cops.
This time the cops are taking it more serious.
I let them in the door.
As the door opens, I see a tall figure
dressed in black standing in our living room, holding shoes
and trying to get into the closet door.
I felt my stomach drop, and it just felt uneasy.
And it hit me like a ton of bricks, just
the sudden realization that this person
had been in our apartment the whole time.
I think at this point, everything
has continued to escalate.
So to see an actual person, and to see that it's
a woman, none of it makes sense why she's
there, how she got in there.
How long was she actually under the bed?
So the police handcuff her and take her out of the apartment.
And as she was talking to the police outside,
I got a better look of her.
She kind of had scraggly hair.
She was very tall.
But she was laughing and, like, just
joking around with the cops and, like, kind
of being a little flirty.
The police told us this person was known for trespassing
in construction sites.
So the screws kind of made sense, and then
also that she had been up for days,
and that she was paranoid.
She thought people were after her.
So the police leave, and we go back in our apartment.
There's still several hours of cleaning to be done because we
didn't know what to do.
We were still running on adrenaline.
We wanted to make the apartment whole again.
So we decided just to stay up and clean.
They've cleared enough stuff away that they can
actually look under the bed.
So Brian grabs a flashlight.
And I shine a flashlight under the bed.
And we find our biggest kitchen knife.
Another wave of anxiety, like, went through me.
It's 2 o'clock in the morning.
And it hit me, like, what kind of danger
we potentially could have been in.
It's really disturbing to think about she
had that the whole time.
And as he's shining the light around, he notices--
A needle and pieces of fabric and stuff.
There's fabric coming from the bottom of the box
spring because she had been stabbing
the bottom of the bed--
--that we had been sitting on all night.
My brother tells me about the knife.
It's just-- it's horrifying because who
knows what her mindset was.
But just the idea that she could have harmed them,
she could have, you know, slashed at their feet--
I don't know.
It just-- it makes my skin crawl, to be honest.
So it hit me pretty slowly, I think.
I definitely couldn't sleep that week.
It just was-- it wasn't like I was scared of things
under the bed anymore.
It was just this whole violation.
I mean, I was just trying to figure out, like,
what motivated her to choose us and how long
had she been in our apartment?
And what was going through her mind?
Who knows?
Maybe she was planning on staying there.
It was really disturbing.
Things could have gone so wrong.
Just me thinking about that gave me anxiety,
even though everything turned out fine.
It just-- I just keep thinking about, what if?