May 9, 2026 · Bronx, New York · Housing Court Failure

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The Bronx “Tenant From Hell”:
NYC Took Five Months to Act
While Neighbors Lived in Fear.

Anthony Orozco, 28, is accused of spending months terrorizing fellow residents of a Bronx apartment building — waving a hatchet and a knife outside neighbors’ doors, masturbating in the hallway, flooding a floor by leaving taps running, and turning on all four stove burners without lighting them, filling his floor with gas while smoking cigarettes. He was not removed.His management company filed for eviction in June 2025. He was still in the building in May 2026 — eleven months later. New York’s housing court had not resolved the case. Two criminal arrests in April 2026 did not result in bail. The law that is supposed to protect tenants from abusive landlords, by design, also makes it extraordinarily difficult to remove a tenant who is turning a residential building into a daily terror campaign against the people living in it.

• 11+monthsmanagement sought eviction, Orozco remained in the building as of May 2026 per court records
• 2arrestsin April 2026 — criminal mischief (April 13) and menacing (April 29) — both resulted in desk appearance tickets, not remand
• 177,000active casesin NYC housing court post-moratorium — up 440% from pre-pandemic levels · NYC Comptroller 2025
• 15 monthsavg. waitto resolve an eviction case in NYC housing court · NY State Bar Association 2025 report

The building sits in the Williamsbridge section of the North Bronx — a working-class residential neighborhood of two- and three-story apartment buildings, far from the courthouses and policy offices where New York’s housing laws are written. For the people living at 1191 East 214th Street, what began as an eccentric new tenant became, by the spring of 2026, a daily threat to physical safety.

Anthony Orozco, 28, allegedly developed a pattern that neighbors describe with a precision that makes clear how long this had been going on. He wore different wigs when harassing different people — as if the costume were a calling card. Neighbors told the New York Post they recognized the system:

“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. Depending on what wig he has on, it's who he messes with. He has different personalities.”

Leonia Clemente, 44, Orozco's neighbor · New York Post, May 2026

Orozco was filmed through a door peephole standing in the hallway holding a hatchet and screaming in Spanish, “Open your door!” He allegedly also lurked in hallways with a knife, knocked on doors late at night, and — in the incident that most alarmed the building — turned on all four stove burners inside his apartment on April 4, 2026, without lighting them, and then sat there smoking cigarettes while gas filled the unit.

“So what was he trying to do, blow up everybody in the building?”

Alexandra Reina, 51, neighbor · New York Post, May 2026

A building manager for Metro Landmark Realtyconfirmed the gas incident to the New York Post. Footage provided to News 12 Bronx showed Orozco in a pink thong in the hallway, engaging in acts of public indecency in front of neighbors’ doors. At least one tenant filed an order of protection after the hatchet incident. Another neighbor told reporters:

“Whatever he can find in his hands, he's going to use it to bang down your door.”

Alexandra Reina, 51, neighbor · News 12 Bronx / New York Post, May 2026

Police eventually made two arrests in April 2026. Both were for specific documented incidents, and both left Orozco in the building after processing.

Two arrests in seventeen days for weapon-related conduct. A gas-filling incident weeks earlier. Video of a hatchet. Video of hallway indecency. An existing order of protection. And as of May 9, 2026, Orozco was still a tenant at 1191 East 214th Street. The criminal cases were pending. The housing court eviction case, filed in June 2025, was also still pending.

Metro Landmark Realty last received rent from Orozco in December 2024. They filed for eviction in June 2025. That is the straightforward non-payment case. By May 2026, the case remained in housing court — eleven months later, with no resolution.

This is not unusual. It is the designed outcome of New York’s layered tenant-protection regime. The numbers are documented:

• 177,000 active eviction cases in NYC housing court as of 2025 — a 440% increase from pre-pandemic levels · NYC Comptroller
• 15 months average time for eviction case disposition in NYC housing court · NY State Bar Association, 2025 subcommittee report
• 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act — extended notice periods, new court burdens on landlords, and additional stays available to tenants before warrant of eviction can be enforced
• April 2024 Good Cause Eviction Law — adds new requirements before a landlord can terminate a tenancy in unregulated units, even for nuisance conduct

The 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA) extended mandatory notice windows, added new procedural steps before landlords can obtain a warrant of eviction, and gave courts discretion to stay eviction warrants based on factors including a tenant’s health condition or children enrolled in local schools. The 2024 Good Cause Eviction Law, which took effect in April 2024, added additional protections for tenants in unregulated units: landlords must now show “good cause” to terminate a tenancy, with “nuisance” listed as a permissible ground but no expedited track for cases involving ongoing violence or criminal conduct.

Advocates of these laws argue they prevent landlords from using trumped-up complaints to push out rent-paying, law-abiding tenants. That is a legitimate concern with its own documented history in New York. But the laws create no expedited mechanism when the non-paying tenant also happens to be swinging a hatchet at neighbors’ doors. The pipe that carries protection for one resident is the same pipe that keeps a dangerous one in place.

Orozco’s situation is not an outlier in New York’s housing landscape — it is a documented failure mode of a system engineered almost entirely around one kind of bad actor (the predatory landlord) with no proportionate response mechanism for the other kind (the dangerous tenant).

The neighbors at 1191 East 214th Street are not wealthy. Williamsbridge is a working-class Bronx neighborhood. The people sharing hallways with Orozco do not have private security, building staff, or attorneys on retainer. They have peephole cameras through which they filmed a man with a hatchet, and they called the police — twice. The police made arrests. The criminal system issued charges Orozco pleaded not guilty to. And the building at which all of this was documented continued, as of publication, to house everyone involved.

The same legislature that gave rent-stabilized tenants additional procedural rights in 2019 did not build an expedited track for removing tenants actively threatening neighbors with weapons. The same law that prevents a landlord from terminating a lease without a good cause hearing has no emergency lane when “good cause” includes documented hatchet incidents and unlit gas burners.