GRESHAM, Ore. (KOIN) — Timothy Smith and his fiancee are getting married in October. On Saturday they had a wedding shower with friends at their Gresham house, the house they haven’t even finished moving into.
Sunday, they left for a few hours. When they came back, there was a burglar in their crawl space wearing his fiancee’s Christmas onesie and someone’s cat — named Spaghetti — wearing a dog shirt, plus holes in their walls, cupcakes that were eaten and freshly made coffee.
“This is my first house, this is my actual property and someone came in and I guess couldn’t figure out how to open a door and kidked a hole in the wall to crawl through to kick a hole in the closet, and then go make themselves a cup of coffee?” Smith told KOIN 6 News. “It blows my mind. It really, really does.”
They came back to their house at 180th and Alder around 3:45 p.m. Sunday. That’s when they noticed things were out of place, a bedroom door locked and holes in their walls in 2 rooms.
At some point, the suspect — now identified as 38-year-old Ryan Bishop — “took off all his clothes and tossed them in the washer and dryer,” Smith said.
But Bishop took his fiancee’s Christmas onesie — “like a zip-up, it’s got little snowball things that bounce off of it” — and put it on.
“Just hung out,” Smith said. “He did so much stuff.”
Apparently, Smith said, Bishop decided to drink some beer and that it was “cool to sit down in my garage and play Super Smash Bros for an unforseeable amount of time.”
Bishop also allegedly “pulled the cupcakes out of the fridge, ate a few of those, pulled the cake out, ate a piece of cake, just made himself a cup of coffee. He was just hanging out wearing my fiancee’s onesie, like, doped up and drinking coffee,” Smith said.
How the cat is involved
Spaghetti is not Smith’s cat, and he doesn’t think it belongs to Bishop.
“I know this is not his cat,” Smith said. “It’s too well-groomed, too well-fed. It looks fine. He took this cat from someone, and so it’s just another victim.”
Bishop found one of the dog’s shirts and put it on Spaghetti, Smith said.
Spaghetti initially popped out of the crawl space but went back inside and couldn’t be coaxed out. But while KOIN 6 News was there, Spaghetti came out and seems fine. Smith is now using social media to try to find Spaghetti’s owner.
He said he crawled about halfway up the space and determined someone was still in there, so he climbed back, closed the hatch and called police.
After Gresham police officer announced they were there, Bishop came out of the crawl space, authorities said. He was wearing that Christmas onesie — and Smith’s fiancee’ told police she didn’t want it back.
He said police found drug paraphernalia and “took most of it, and then they left and an hour later I found a bag off pre-prepared needles, like 12 of them, and a pipe and bunch of meth.”
‘Someone ruined sanctity of my house’
Smith said he and his fiancee spent the last year looking for a house and they finally closed on this one.
“We needed it because we’re getting married in October,” he said. But “someone came in and ruined the sanctity of my own home before I was even moved in.”
His fiancee doesn’t feel safe anymore and Smith said he feels “like a part of my soul has kind of been destroyed.”
“I can finally be done with our apartment life. I can have something to call my own,” he told KOIN 6 News. “Then a person comes in and destroys that. It just hurts. It hurts a lot.”
Bishop was booked for burglary, criminal mischief and theft.
