He was trying to keep someone from breaking into his home. However, trying to turn away thieves has turned into a battle with his apartment complex.
Lansing resident Brandon Sharpe set up several cameras in and around his apartment for security purposes. After having them up for a couple weeks, he said the apartment complex, Reside Apartments, removed and ripped out most of the cameras he put up.
"I couldn't believe it...wow that can't be legal that's a destruction of property," said Brandon Sharpe.
In hopes of catching the thief that broke into his storage unit, Brandon Sharpe felt mounted surveillance camera's one facing the front door, one facing outside in the parking lot at his car,
the third one outside his door and a fourth by his storage unit
"People come and go from this complex all the time. There are notices downstairs that apartments have been broken into recently," said Sharpe.
Although, his lease does say that a tenant will not make any repairs or alterations to the premises including nailing holes without landlord consent. The apartment complex told us they took them down because he had no right to put up surveillance cameras outside the home.
"How they think that would be okay to come into someone's house and takeout their personal property, something they use to protect themselves," said Sharpe.
Brandon said they weren't truthful in the way they removed them.
"The first text message is the AC has been running continuously, and it was going to do damage to the unit if I didn't shut it off," said Sharpe.
Brandon said it wasn't leaking because only the fan was on.
"I thought they were using that as an excuse to get into my place to get to the cameras," said Sharpe.
From the surveillance video outside the apartment door, it shows a maintenance person walking up and cutting the camera down.
It's one thing to have the surveillance cameras outside and Brandon said maybe understandable because they are in the hallway. But to come inside and see his camera on the floor he felt was unacceptable.
"Don't know where they'd think that'd be OK," said Sharpe.
The leasing office refused to speak on camera ...instead they told us there were no camera's inside the home...
However, Branden said the screws that FOX 47 News saw on his ceiling here, and the camera shown in this worker's hand from the surveillance video, show a different story.
"It's like they were never in here to mess with an AC, they just wanted the cameras down," said Sharpe.
The video shows the maintenance team inside his apartment, one person removing the camera and another walking into the back of the apartment. It's not clear exactly what they were doing in the back of his apartment.
"I'm not comfortable with that at all. I don't have camera's back there and I didn't think I needed to have cameras back there," said Sharpe.
Michigan law allows you to film anything that is visible to the public. Meaning the camera that Brandon had inside his home facing outside was OK since he did not use any type of altering to zoom. For instance, if you zoom into a window to view something that is not visible to the public that is not OK. Brandon's cameras are no different than him standing by the window and filming on a phone.
