‘He wanted to play doctor on us’: Couple describes sheer terror of finding sick PHROGGER in their home
HONOLULU, HAWAII: Even the thought of discovering an intruder lurking in your home and keeping watch on you without your knowledge is petrifying. But a Hawaiian couple lived this terror after they found a stranger living in their house when they returned from a long vacation.
James and Brittany Campbell, who feature in Lifetime’s true crime show ‘Phrogging: Hider in My House’, say they had gone for the week to visit family on the mainland and when they returned, they got the surprise of their lives. The couple and their two young sons returned to their Honululu home on September 20, 2019. Upon their arrival, they found a bike standing outside their residence and sensed the trauma coming next. James, who serves in the Navy, went to open his home’s front door, but found he couldn’t. He realized someone was pulling it from the inside.
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“There is a man peeking through the door. He’s trying to hold it shut and the man says, ‘this is not your house’ just very calmly,” James recalled, according to NY Post. “I am just floored.” James grabbed a sledgehammer for protection and managed to get the man out of the house while Brittany frantically called 911. When the intruder exited the house, the couple realized he was wearing James’ clothes. “We notice he’s wearing my clothes. Things are getting crazier by the moment,” James said.
Soon the police arrived at the residence and arrested the man, who they identified as 23-year-old Ezequiel Zayas. He was soon hauled away, but the nightmare was just beginning. When the couple went inside, they found their house was “just trashed,” Brittany told the New York Post. Their residence was completely turned upside down. The couple also discovered that their old laptop had been used to record disturbing diary entries about the family. "There [were] all these typed notes called The Omnivore Trials: A rehabilitation for Ratlike people," James told the show. By now, the couple realized that someone was living in their house longer than they ever imagined. “He wanted to play doctor on us, and not in the cute little kid way,” Brittany told the Post. “[He wrote about] how he could make us into perfect people.”
The stay-at-home mother also found an explicit video of the man on her laptop. “This guy had been sitting naked in my chair. That’s disgusting,” Brittany says on the television show, according to the publication. “I just felt terror.” The intruder even knew some chilling details about the couple that no one else did. “The strangest thing is that he knew medical information about us,” Brittany told the Post. “It’s really bizarre.”
Suddenly, pennies started to drop as the couple began to make sense of incidents that were previously unexplainable. For example, they had noticed a computer webcam turning on in the middle of the night over recent months, and doors being left open or unlocked. The whole thing left the family terrified and made them move out of the house. “This is an incident that has really affected us psychologically as a family. It’s uprooted our entire lives,” Brittany told the Post. “Recovering from this has been really difficult.”