HOUSTON – A Houston business owner says she’s fed up with bored teenagers trespassing while her building is closed due to stay-at-home orders.
Jentry Kelley, owner of Jentry Kelley Cosmetics at Hazard Street and the Southwest Freeway, said she’s seeing a lot of “activity” in the alley behind her building during normal times. Kelley said it’s teenagers who are trespassing her space.
"We have a lot of kids go up on the roof to do all kinds of things, illegal things they should not be doing," she said.
The latest incident happened at 3:45 a.m. Saturday and was captured on a surveillance video.
The video appears to show three teenage girls and a dog in the alley.
"It looked like they were following on their phones almost like they were on a scavenger hunt," said Bri Collins, who owns BCRN Aesthetics inside the JKC building.
The business owners want to know why the girls were out at that time of night and what they were doing together.
"Are they having a slumber party during quarantine? I saw them digging through the ditch, walking behind this building, I saw they had taken out my handicap ramp," Kelley said.
Kelley said the trio then made their way up a winding staircase to the roof.
“Then I saw them throw something off the roof. What they threw off the roof looked like the drainpipe to my air conditioner and that’s when I got upset. They have no business being up there,” she said.
Kelley is now looking to further protect her property.
"I’m gonna have to call my contractor to get the staircase taken down completely or get a door put up with barbwire," she said.
But it's an added expense for a small business just trying to get by after more than 30 days of the shutdown.
“I’m focused on paying my employees to stay at home right now, I really don’t want to spend $1,000, $2,000 to get a gate made or a door made or do whatever I have to do to get things where kids can’t get up there,” Kelley said.
As for the teens, she wants them to learn to respect private property.
“I do have a surveillance camera, I see everything that happens back here so I just hope I don’t see them again,” she said.