Police took Anthony Orozco into custody at his Williamsbridge apartment on a Friday evening around 5:45 p.m., charging him with criminal contempt for violating an order of protection, the third time in roughly a month that he has faced arrest, the New York Post reported. As of Saturday afternoon, Orozco remained in custody.
The charge stems from an alleged confrontation with neighbor Leonia Clemente, 44, who holds the protective order against him. But the latest arrest is only one chapter in a pattern of accusations that residents of the Bronx apartment complex say has upended their daily lives, and that the building's management company says it has been trying, unsuccessfully, to end through eviction since at least last June.
Orozco has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him, court records show.
The timeline that led to Orozco's most recent arrest stretches back to early April. On April 4, a manager for Metro Landmark Realty, the building's management company, told the Post that Orozco turned on all four stove burners inside his apartment without lighting them, flooding the unit with gas.
Neighbor Alexandra Reina, 51, described the scene bluntly.
"He was sitting there smoking cigarettes under this gas. The whole area was gassed down. So what was he trying to do, blow up everybody in the building?"
The consequences of that incident reach beyond Orozco's apartment. Metro Landmark Realty said all gas service for the entire building has been shut off for a month, meaning every tenant in the complex has gone without gas because of what one resident is alleged to have done.
Nine days later, on April 13, Orozco allegedly broke a camera outside Clemente's apartment with a stick. He was charged with criminal mischief. Then on April 29, police said he was accused of swinging a metal rail at Clemente in front of her apartment. That incident led to a menacing charge.
Each arrest fed back into the same cycle: charges filed, not-guilty pleas entered, and Orozco returning to the building where the people he is accused of threatening still live.
Clemente told the Post that the incident triggering the latest arrest involved her son. She said Orozco confronted the boy, and she intervened.
"He was threatening my son. I walked to the doorway and told him, 'You're not supposed to talk to me or my son so leave us alone.'"
She said Orozco's response was immediate and hostile.
"He started screaming some stuff in Spanish, talking about how he hates us and he's going to get us."
Residents have also accused Orozco of banging on doors and engaging in lewd behavior in the building's hallways. Clemente offered a detail that captures the surreal quality of the situation, telling the Post that Orozco wears different wigs when he targets different neighbors.
"The blonde wig, he messes with me. The pink wig, he messes with the guy on the second floor. The red wig, he messes with the third floor."
Doorbell camera footage obtained by the Post showed the moment of Orozco's arrest. In the video, he can be seen speaking loudly on the phone in Spanish. Officers pull him into the hallway and place him in handcuffs. At one point, he says "mi telefono", "my phone." An officer responds: "I know, we have to hang up the phone."
For the people living in that building, the sight of police in the hallway has become familiar. Violent confrontations in shared spaces, whether apartment hallways or shopping centers, carry a particular weight for the bystanders who have no choice but to keep showing up to the place where the threat lives.
Metro Landmark Realty says it has been trying to remove Orozco from the building since at least June. The company also claims he has not paid rent since December 2024. Yet as of the latest arrest, he still occupied the apartment.
New York's tenant-protection laws are among the most extensive in the country. They were designed to shield renters from predatory landlords. But cases like this expose the other side of the equation: what happens when the legal system's procedural safeguards effectively trap law-abiding tenants in a building with someone who has been arrested multiple times, charged with menacing, accused of filling a building with gas, and is the subject of an active order of protection?
The management company is left in a bind. It cannot simply change the locks. The eviction case grinds through the courts. And in the meantime, the gas stays off for every tenant in the building, a collective punishment imposed not by the landlord, but by the circumstances one tenant allegedly created.
The broader pattern is not unique to this Bronx building. Across New York City, residents and property managers have described a system in which repeat offenders cycle through arrests and releases while the people around them absorb the consequences. Courts weighing public safety against individual rights face these tensions in contexts ranging from immigration detention to housing disputes, and the people who bear the cost are almost never the ones making the decisions.
Consider the sequence. On April 4, Orozco allegedly turned on four gas burners without lighting them. On April 13, he allegedly smashed a neighbor's camera. On April 29, police said he swung a metal rail at Clemente. Each time, charges followed. Each time, he pleaded not guilty. Each time, he went back to the same building.
Now comes the criminal contempt charge, for violating the very order of protection that was supposed to keep Clemente and her son safe. The order existed. It was on paper. And Orozco allegedly walked right past it to threaten a child.
That is the gap between policy and reality that the residents of this Bronx complex live inside every day. When law enforcement finally closes a case, there is at least a sense of finality. Here, there is none, just a revolving door of charges, pleas, and returns.
The open questions are obvious. What will it take for the eviction to go through? Will the criminal contempt charge result in Orozco being held, or will he be released back into the building once more? And how long are the other tenants, the ones paying rent, following the rules, and living without gas, expected to wait?
No one in the story has answered those questions. The system hasn't, either. Arrests make headlines, but for the families on the other side of the wall, the only thing that matters is whether the person comes back.
Leonia Clemente did what the system tells people to do. She got an order of protection. She called the police. She cooperated with investigators. She spoke on the record. And her son still got threatened in the hallway of his own home.
Alexandra Reina watched a neighbor sit under a cloud of unlit gas, smoking cigarettes, and asked the question any reasonable person would ask. The building's gas has been off for a month. That means no hot meals cooked on a stove, no gas heat if needed, for everyone, because of one man's alleged actions.
Metro Landmark Realty has been pursuing eviction for close to a year. Orozco hasn't paid rent since December. He has been arrested at least three times in a single month. And the eviction still isn't done. Authorities in other jurisdictions launch full-scale manhunts for violent suspects. In this Bronx building, the suspect lives down the hall.
New York's housing courts were built to protect vulnerable tenants. That is a worthy goal. But when the process itself becomes the threat, when months of filings and hearings leave a building full of families trapped alongside someone facing a growing list of criminal charges, the protection runs in only one direction.
The people who follow the rules deserve at least as much patience as the system extends to those who break them.
