- April 17, 2024
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Two people in Daytona North woke up the morning of Sunday, April 22 to find a young man they didn't know — and who had just days before been released from the county jail — asleep on their couch, according to a Flagler County Sheriff's Office arrest report.
The first one to notice the young man and realize he was someone unfamiliar was a 62-year-old man who'd been visiting at the home on Hazelut Street. He woke up because the dogs were barking.
When he walked out into the living room, he noticed that there was someone he didn't recognize asleep on the couch. The 62-year-old walked over to the bedroom of the 72-year-old woman who owned the home and woke her up to see if the man was someone she knew.
She didn't recognize him either, according to the report.
The 62-year-old called 911, and as he was on the phone with the dispatcher, the uninvited couch crasher — later revealed to be 19-year-old Anthony Pezza — awoke and tried to leave. The 62-year-old man stopped him, keeping him there until a deputy arrived.
The woman told the deputy that she'd woken up earlier that morning and had noticed the outline of someone sleeping on the couch, but had assumed it was a a female acquaintance she knew who was going through a rough patch and might have needed someplace to stay, according to the report.
When the 62-year-old man woke her up later, she realized the person on the couch wasn't her acquaintance. When the deputy asked, she said she wanted to press charges.
Pezza agreed to speak with a deputy, telling him that he'd been hanging out and drinking at a home on Canal Street until about 4 a.m., when, after drinking a lot of booze, he left on a bicycle for his home on Hickory Street — which is also in Daytona North, but a couple blocks east and about a mile south of the Hazelnut Street home.
He told the deputy he didn't remember entering the Hazelnut Street house. But he hadn't simply walked in: The residents of the house confirmed that they'd locked it the night before, and the deputy found that one door on the house had been pried open, the wood splintered. It hadn't been that way the previous day, the owner confirmed.
Pezza has been charged with trespassing and criminal mischief. He was previously convicted in November 2017 of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon or delinquent.
That incident occurred in July 2017, when deputies raided a home he lived in on Blueberry Street and found a meth lab. They also found Pezza — who'd in 2016 been adjudicated a delinquent for resisting an arrest without violence — in possession of a .22-gauge rifle.
He was incarcerated at the jail on July 14, 2017 in connection with the firearm charge and released on April 19, 2018.
