A Judge Ordered Him to Stay 6 Feet From People’s Butts. He Got 170 Days — His Third Jail Term This Year.
On September 8, 2026, a Los Angeles County court sentenced Calese Carron Crowder, 39, to 170 days in county jail — his third jail sentence in under a year for violating parole. The violation: coming within six feet of a stranger’s backside, a specific distance a court had already written into his parole terms after years of complaints that he crouches behind women in stores and sniffs them.
Glendale police arrested Crowder on August 28 after employees at a discount grocery store and a nearby Marshalls reported a man “hunkered down” and pressing close to customers to smell them. It was not a new story to Glendale or Burbank police. Crowder’s pattern of prowling, peeping, and following women in retail stores goes back to at least 2021, and a viral 2023 video turned him into a national name.
He has now been sentenced, released, and rearrested enough times that Los Angeles-area TV stations track the case as a recurring segment. The question the case keeps raising is not whether Crowder will be caught again — he always is — but why California’s legal system keeps handing him sentences measured in months rather than years.
- 170 days — county jail sentence imposed September 8, 2026, for violating parole — ABC7 LA; KTLA
- 6 feet — the exact no-contact buffer his parole order set around other people — KTLA
- 3 sentences in under a year — 99 days (Dec. 2025), 105 days (April 2026), 170 days (Sept. 2026) — NBC4 Investigates; Yahoo/KTLA
- 2021 — year Glendale and Burbank police records show this pattern of incidents began — ABC7 LA
- 8 years — prison time Crowder had already served for an earlier peeping-and-prowling conviction — Audacy/KNX News
According to Glendale police and ABC7 Los Angeles, officers responded around 3:30 p.m. on August 28 to a report of a man crouching close to customers at the Big Sav Discount Store in the 1500 block of West Glenoaks Boulevard. A second call came in from a nearby Marshalls describing similar behavior. Store manager Jimmy Koh told ABC7 the pattern was unmistakable: “Crouching down like he normally would, and he’ll just sniff like any woman’s butt.” Surveillance footage from both stores led officers to Crowder, whom they located and arrested in the 100 block of South Brand Boulevard. He was held without bail on a parole-violation hold.
Eleven days later, on September 8, the court found Crowder had violated a special condition of his parole — specifically, an order that he “shall not come within 6 feet of people’s butts,” per KTLA’s reporting on the hearing. He was also ordered to stay 100 yards away from the Big Sav, Marshalls, and HomeGoods stores in Glendale where he had been caught. The sentence: 170 days in Los Angeles County jail, with 12 days already credited for time served since the arrest.
Crowder’s name first went national in August 2023, when a TikTok video showing him crouching behind a woman at a Barnes & Noble in Burbank drew millions of views. It was not an isolated clip. That same month, Glendale police arrested Crowder on suspicion of peeping into the window of an occupied family home with children present. Glendale Police Sgt. Victor Jackson said at the time: “The family, including children, were home at the time of the incident. Glendale police patrol officers were quickly dispatched.”
The allegations reach back further than 2023. Former NBA player Robert Horry’s wife, Candice Horry, said publicly that Crowder had stalked their daughter at their home more than a decade earlier. “This man stalked my teenage daughter at our home over 10 years ago,” she said, according to Audacy’s KNX News. “He went to jail only to come out and continue the same behavior.” Court records reviewed by KNX News show Crowder had in fact served roughly eight years in prison on an earlier peeping-and-prowling conviction before his release.
Remember him? Calese Carron Crowder was arrested last year for butt-sniffing at a Burbank store. Well, he was arrested again for butt-sniffing in a Glendale store on Friday.
Once out, the incidents resumed on a regular clock. In July 2025, Crowder was arrested at a Nordstrom Rack in Burbank after allegedly following and crouching near a woman in the store’s women’s department; bail was set at $100,000. Weeks later, in August 2025, he was arrested again at a Burbank Walgreens on a similar allegation. That November, he was arrested a third time in 2025 — not for a new sniffing incident, but for failing to complete his annual sex-offender registration for more than two months, according to Glendale police. Fox News, citing jail booking records, reported the November arrest was Crowder’s 43rd booking in Los Angeles County since 2005.
Calese Carron Crowder, 38, of Glendale, is accused of following a female customer through the women's section and crouching near her while attempting to sniff her buttocks.
Every one of Crowder’s recent bookings has resulted in a parole-violation sentence, not a new felony conviction — and defense attorney Dmitry Gorin told KTLA that is a function of California’s statute, not prosecutorial reluctance. “If there’s an actual touching, that’s a felony,” Gorin said. “But just sniffing somebody, it really doesn’t rise to a felony. As the law stands now, it is very hard to file a felony offense based on this conduct.”
“Yes, you can lock him up, but eventually he's going to be out. And until he gets treatment, it's just reoffending and reoffending and reoffending.”
Dmitry Gorin, criminal defense attorney, to KTLA
That leaves the parole-violation charge as prosecutors’ main tool, and it caps out low. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records reviewed by IBTimes UK show Crowder was released to parole supervision in June 2025 after serving time on convictions for burglary, robbery, attempted first-degree burglary, and controlled-substance possession — the burglary case is the one whose parole terms he keeps breaking. Separately, Fox News reported he had been sentenced that February to a year in county jail for indecent exposure in Santa Clarita, and was released early. Each violation since has produced a sentence measured in weeks, not years: 99 days in December 2025, 105 days in April 2026, and now 170 days.
No single official ordered Crowder released early each time — the pattern is built into how the case gets charged. But the offices with authority over the pieces are identifiable.
State parole — the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, a cabinet-level department under Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA), supervises Crowder’s parole and is the agency whose supervision he keeps violating.
The prosecutor — Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman, a former Republican who ran as an independent and now carries no party preference, took office in December 2024 after defeating Democratic incumbent George Gascón. Hochman’s office is credited in MyNewsLA’s reporting as the source confirming the September 8 sentencing; it has not been quoted publicly proposing a different charge in this case.
The jurisdiction — Glendale, California, a general-law city in Los Angeles County, where the arrests occurred and where Glendale Police Department has made the case a recurring priority.
Gorin’s read is that this specific parole-violation sentence may hold longer than the last two, because it ties back to the underlying felony burglary case rather than a misdemeanor alone. But nothing in the record suggests Crowder is getting mental health treatment during any of these county-jail stays, and nothing in California’s penal code currently reclassifies non-contact “sniffing” as a felony on its own. Absent one of those two changes, the math the case has run for five years keeps producing the same result: an arrest, a hearing, a jail term measured in months, and a release date.
Calese Crowder has been sentenced three times in under a year for violating a parole order that bars him from coming within six feet of strangers — and each sentence has run out. His September 8 term, 170 days, is his longest yet, but it is still a county-jail stay for a parole violation, not a new felony conviction, because California law treats non-contact “sniffing” as conduct too minor to charge as a felony. Nothing in the record shows that calculus, or the absence of mandated treatment, changing before his release date arrives.
