There was some next-level Grinchy behavior at a Fillmore District housing complex, with the maintenance staff apparently caught on camera pilfering the tenants’ Christmas gifts, and the low-income tenants are now out thousands of dollars.

Five days before Christmas, Mission Local broke a porch pirate story that is absolutely unlike any other we had ever heard. Because in this case, the porch pirates were not everyday thieves looking to score a free package off someone’s porch.

They were actually employees of the property management company allegedly stealing gifts from inside the apartments, apartments for which they had keys. And mind you, this was a low-income housing complex in the Fillmore District, so the jilted tenants could ill afford to lose an estimated thousands of dollars worth of stolen gifts.

The apartment complex is the Thomas Paine Square Apartments at Golden Gate Avenue and Webster Street, and the tenants’ Ring video camera seems to capture the Christmas-stealing caper. Tenants have confirmed that three of the four people seen in the video are employees of the property manager Domus Management Company. Nothing incriminating really happens until the 2:04 mark of the video, when one employee is clearly trying to disable the Ring camera.

“This shit drilled on the wall,” the employee says. “You gotta drill it off to take it off.” But two other staffers are gleefully carrying out wrapped gifts at that point, and they use a heart-shaped wreath to block the camera’s view

“This is cute, actually,” one of the employees says of the wreath she is using to hide her stealing.

As Mission Local explains, one of the robbed (and disabled!) tenants’ caregivers details the stolen items as being worth more than $2,000. Another tenant says that a box of power tolls was stolen from the garage during the same time frame. Police reports have been filed in both cases.

KGO picked up the story on Tuesday, speaking to the caregiver for the robbed tenant. "They took over $2000 in Christmas items. They took advent calendars, built bear kits, they took gifts and presents that were purchased for friends and family members," that caretaker Aveda Hussain told KGO.

The Lodi-based property manager says the three employees were fired effective immediately, but the company is not exactly bending over backwards to do the right thing.

“Staff did enter the unit, as evidenced by the Ring footage, and remove what they referred to as trash,” Domus president Cathy Metcalf told Mission Local last Thursday. “However, that is a violation of Domus policy and they have been terminated effective today.”

But she also claimed that the unit was occupied by multiple tenants who were “squatters” and that company was working on evicting them. “The attorney is working on the notice,” she said last week, strongly indicating that the eviction proceedings are being influenced by the fact that the tenant complained to the press about the company’s shady employees.

Mission Local notes there is only one tenant in the unit, and the caregiver lives elsewhere. And the tenant says they have lived there since 2021, and have never received any eviction communications over those four years.

So we may have a miserable Christmas situation where a tenant not only had their gifts stolen, but might get evicted for speaking up about it.

Also, this whole situation adds insult to injury for tenants at Thomas Paine Square Apartments, who earlier this year went to the media with their complaints about deferred maintenance by Domus and generally substandard living conditions at the complex.

Related: San Jose Christmas Decoration Thief Is Stealing Specifically Only Disney-Themed Decorations, Remains at Large [SFist]

Image: Google Street View