Local California Police Arrest 2 After Finding Stolen Items in Shuttered Marine Corps Facility

Two people were arrested in connection to a makeshift living space set up in an old Marine Corps hangar, local police announced Sunday.

Joshua Micheal Rosario, 29, and Patricia Lynn Ratliff, 53, were arrested for outstanding warrants after police discovered them in a hideout at the now-shuttered Marine Corps Air Station El Toro hangar near Irvine, California. Rosario was booked on numerous charges, including burglary and drug possession, according to the Irvine Police Department in a social media post over the weekend.

Rosario remained in the Orange County Sheriff's Department custody as of Tuesday morning, according to inmate records. Ratliff was also arrested for outstanding warrants and trespassing, but does not appear to be in custody, according to a records search.

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"Officers found two people who had set up a makeshift living space," the police announced. "The area had a couch, TV, and what appeared to be a recording studio, complete with disco lights and a fog machine."

The setup was powered by car batteries. Police also found 11 bicycles, several spools of copper wire, fireworks, personal property from Irvine residents, two airsoft guns and drug paraphernalia, the social media post said.

MCAS El Toro was closed in July 1999 under the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990, according to the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, or NAVFAC. The command did not respond to questions from Military.com on Tuesday on whether it still has any jurisdiction over MCAS El Toro.

The act, which has seen several iterations over the years, was authorized by the government to dispose of and reduce unneeded defense facilities, typically in the United States. In El Toro's case, that meant the roughly 4,700 acres of military land was divided up between state and federal agencies, including the Orange County Great Park in California.

But the abandoned military facilities have long been home to squatters, forcing law enforcement in cities and towns across the country to respond to alleged incidents of trespassing. Squatters laid claim to an old Navy base in New Orleans in 2022, resulting in a response from local SWAT, firefighter, EMS and homeless service to secure the site, for example.

BRAC sites have long been a contentious topic in Congress, Katherine Kuzminski, a deputy director at the Center for a New American Security, told Military.com in a phone interview Tuesday. She said that lawmakers have bristled at shuttering job-producing military installations in their districts, leading to a push in recent years to look at closing overseas bases to save government costs instead.

As a result, sometimes these BRAC sites become somewhat of a no-man's-land.

"When we look at the footprint of historically where bases were assigned, they were in areas that were more affordable for the federal government to purchase," Kuzminski said. "This tends to be physical land that was somewhere that's not in a population center … which is why the federal government could afford to purchase it, whether it was in the 1940s or earlier than that, or in more recent years.

"Because they're more remote and they're not tied to population centers, it's harder to manage," she added.

Squatting is not an issue limited to abandoned BRAC facilities. Last year, Military.com reported that a Government Accountability Office study found squatting was a problem for in-use military housing and unused barracks.

Irvine police said that they had cited or arrested Rosario and Ratliff "multiple times" for trespassing at El Toro.

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