Serial “Butt Sniffer” Calese Crowder Arrested Again in Glendale

GLENDALE, Calif., Aug. 28, 2026. The manager at a Glenoaks Boulevard discount store did not need surveillance footage to know who was crouched behind his shelf-stocking employee. He had already caught the same man doing the same thing, in the same store, twice before. The footage, obtained later by local news outlets, only confirmed what he already knew. It showed Calese Crowder folded low behind the woman, positioned to smell her from behind as she worked. Employees called Glendale police. Minutes later, officers were dispatched to a Marshalls a few blocks away, where witnesses described a man crouching and creeping through the aisles behind other shoppers, as though two stores in one afternoon were simply part of his route. Detectives pulled surveillance video from both locations and matched the man on camera to Crowder, a registered sex offender with five years and five different Southern California retailers on his record, and a court system that keeps sending him back to shop.

Crowder, 39, was found nearby on South Brand Boulevard a short time later and taken in on a suspected parole violation. He is being held without bail while the case is submitted to Los Angeles County prosecutors for possible new charges. It is his latest arrest since being released to parole supervision in June 2025, following a burglary conviction that, had it been served as imposed, would have kept him in state custody well into 2027.

Crowder's documented pattern goes back to at least 2021, when police in Glendale and Burbank began fielding reports of a man crouching behind women in stores and appearing to smell them. He was already required to register as a sex offender because of an earlier case when, in August 2023, Glendale officers arrested him for peering through the window of a family home with children inside. A judge sentenced him to 60 days in county jail, a sex offender rehabilitation program, and a protective order for the family, and credit for time already served put him back on the street within a day. That same month, video surfaced online of Crowder crouched behind a woman at a Burbank bookstore, appearing to sniff her from behind, matching a pattern police say he had already established. You can watch the video here. Within another day of walking free, Glendale police arrested him again, this time for failing to register as previously ordered.

By 2024 Crowder was in state prison, convicted of attempted first degree burglary and sentenced to three years. Time-served credit and participation in prison programs returned him to parole supervision by June 2025, less than a year into that term. Had the sentence been carried out as imposed, Crowder would have remained incarcerated well into 2027, incapable of returning to the department stores and drugstores where he had already built a public record.

He did not wait long. Within weeks of his release, Burbank police arrested him at a Nordstrom Rack after a shopper flagged an unfamiliar man lingering around the women's section and making her uncomfortable. A month later, he was arrested a second time, accused of the same conduct inside a Walgreens in Burbank. That fall, Crowder went more than two months without completing his annual sex offender registration. Glendale police's Assaults Unit caught the lapse without prompting and arrested him at his home in November. The court that handled the case next is where the pattern actually breaks down.

For that violation and the pattern preceding it, a judge sentenced Crowder to 99 days in county jail in December. By April 2026 he was in court again for additional parole violations, and this time the sentence was 105 days. Add those two terms to the 60 days from 2023, and the total comes to 264 days in county jail, the state's cumulative answer, across three years, to a documented and repeating pattern. The multi-year prison term from his original burglary conviction remains unserved. Four months after his last release, he was arrested a third time at the same Glenoaks Boulevard store.

By the time of that arrest, Crowder had been accused of the same act at a bookstore, a department store, a pharmacy, a grocery store and a clothing retailer, a five-store tour of Southern California retail that the state's supervision apparatus has done remarkably little to interrupt. Crowder's file amounts to one unbroken pattern. He has been arrested, sentenced, released, and arrested again in nearly the same spot, five times over five years. The parole board and the courts that handled his case have treated every violation as its own isolated event rather than the continuation of one they already knew about. Evan Doerr, Founder and Executive Director of the Preventable Crime Project, said: “The women of Glendale were entrusted to a system built to protect them, and that system answered with sixty days, then ninety-nine, then one hundred and five. Each of these was a deliberate choice, made with full knowledge of the record, to return a documented predator to the very streets and stores where he had already caused harm. There is nothing amusing about a pattern this well documented being treated, again and again, as though it were new.” The Preventable Crime Project's Judicial Performance Database tracks precisely this pattern, cataloguing the sentencing decisions that keep known offenders cycling through county jails instead of state prison.

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