LA Squatter Dies Falling Out of Tree House He Built to Escape Eviction

California is a crazy place and it’s not just San Francisco where that is obvious. This story caught my attention today because the backstory to it is so long and so incredible. 

It started way back in 1958 when the state decided to build a freeway that would run directly between Long Beach in south LA County up to the Pasadena area in north LA County. Most of the freeway was built in the mid-1960s but there was a section just about four miles long that never got completed. It was the northernmost section that would connect the freeway (now called the I-710) to an east-west freeway called the 210 freeway.

Because the state planned to complete the freeway eventually, it started buying up property it would need to build it. But resistance to the construction continued and about 8 years ago the state finally conceded that it would never happen. This created an unusual situation where CALTRANS, the state’s transportation agency, owned about 400 homes for which it was the landlord. For many years CALTRANS was renting out the homes at relatively discounted rates, but some homes remained empty and boarded up as the state considered selling them off.

And that’s where things got interesting. In March 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, a group of activists calling themselves Reclaiming Our Homes started moving into the empty homes claiming them for themselves.

On Saturday morning, the protesters and their families moved into a two-bedroom bungalow in El Sereno. They say they plan to remain indefinitely and potentially take over more houses.

They are calling on state and local governments to use all publicly owned vacant homes, libraries, recreation centers and other properties to house people immediately. They say the the region’s extreme lack of affordable housing and the threat of the novel coronavirus pushed them to act.

“I am a mother of two daughters. I need a home,” said Martha Escudero, 42, who has spent the last 18 months living on couches with friends and family members in neighborhoods across East Los Angeles. “There’s these homes that are vacant, and they belong to the community.”

As promised, they did seize more homes.

A group of homeless and housing-insecure Angelenos seized more vacant, publicly owned homes in El Sereno on Wednesday, arguing that government officials have failed to provide the shelter that’s necessary for them to remain healthy during the coronavirus pandemic…

The protesters have taken over 12 homes and plan to remain in the properties indefinitely, organizers said…

In El Sereno on Wednesday afternoon, the protesters acted quickly and stealthily to occupy more houses. They had directed reporters to a vacant home less than a mile away from the house that was taken over Saturday. But the occupation was being staged on another block.

It’s not completely clear when but one of the activists who seized a home was Benito Flores. Flores continued to stay in the home until last month when the police were finally scheduled to evict him. But Flores had a plan to make sure he couldn’t be removed from the home.

Flores, a 70-year-old retired welder, had illegally seized a home five years ago after its owner, the California Department of Transportation, had left it vacant. He’d been allowed to stay for a few months, then was directed to this nearby home owned by the agency, but now it was time to go.

Later in the morning, deputies with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department were scheduled to lock him out.

Flores clearly had other plans. Over months, he’d sawed wooden two-by-fours to use as a brace between the front door and an interior wall to make it harder to breach. He bolted shut the metal screen door. Once Flores was satisfied he’d secured the entrance Tuesday, he retreated to a wooden structure he built 28 feet high in an ash tree in the backyard.

If the police wanted him to leave, they’d have to come get him in his tree house.

“I plan to resist as long as I can,” Flores said.

Here’s the treehouse:

A 70-year-old man who seized a vacant state-owned home in Los Angeles more than five years ago has built an elaborate tree house in the backyard to protest his eviction. He and supporters warded off sheriff’s deputies Tuesday. https://t.co/K6Esnp4Wpp

— Liam Dillon (@dillonliam) June 3, 2025

As of last month, most of the “Reclaimers” who’d occupied these homes had accepted payouts of up to $20,000 to leave. That’s after CALTRANS allowed them to remain in the homes for years at rates far below the local market for housing. But Flores and three others refused to leave. He even wrote a letter to the Sheriff saying he and the others would be in these homes for the rest of their lives.

“We are going to live on the streets for the rest of our lives,” Flores said of he and others evicted in the protest group in an open letter he sent to Sheriff Robert Luna last week.

In Flores’ case that turned out to be true.

In the six weeks since the failed eviction attempt, Flores continued to fortify the property, including building additional defenses in a second tree in the backyard. Supporters believe that Flores died after falling out of that tree.

On Friday afternoon, a neighbor found him unresponsive on the ground near the tree with his safety harness broken, said Roberto Flores, who operates a private community center in El Sereno and helped organize the ongoing protests…

About 50 mourners gathered at Flores’ home Friday night for a vigil and ceremony honoring his life and activism. His body, covered with a white sheet, remained in the backyard and supporters placed flowers on it after paying their respects.

Obviously, no one deserves to have their life end like that, but Benito Flores had milked a free or nearly free home out of the state for years. Taxpayers own those homes and he had no right to seize one for his personal use. Had he not been planning to defy the police to remain there past the point everyone else had left, he’d still be alive.