California’s serial butt-sniffer has struck again — and police have once again placed him behind bars.
Calese Crowder, 39, is a registered sex offender who apparently gets a thrill from sneaking up behind unsuspecting women and smelling them — specifically, their posteriors. He was identified on surveillance video from at least two Southern California stores on Friday, and police apprehended him a short time later.
The first call hit the Glendale Police Department around 3:30 p.m. local time, and cops were dispatched to a location in the 1500 block of Glenoaks Boulevard. The report indicated that a suspicious man had been seen crouching in the aisles, and police said that he appeared to be “sniffing someone out.”
Officers were just finishing up at that scene when they were called to another location in the same vicinity — and the report was almost exactly the same: a suspicious-looking man crouching in the aisles and appearing to smell people as they passed by him.
After reviewing surveillance footage from both locations, police identified Crowder. They were able to track him down a short distance from the second location and placed him under arrest for violating the conditions of his parole.
Crowder was previously arrested for a similar crime in 2025, when police caught him behaving strangely as he wandered around the women’s department at a Nordstrom Rack in Burbank’s Empire Center. Burbank police stated at the time that Crowder had been “engaging in lewd behavior by inappropriately sniffing her buttocks.”
At the time, Crowder was already on parole — for a number of similar charges dating back several years — and was charged with violating those conditions. He was ordered to serve 135 days in the Los Angeles County Jail — for that parole violation — in September of 2025.
In 2023, after a similar incident at a Barnes & Noble, Crowder was arrested, and it was confirmed that he had failed to follow a court order to register with local police as a sex offender. At that time, a Fox News digital report confirmed that he’d been arrested 43 times in Los Angeles County alone since 2005.
“As a component of a previous arrest and sentencing Crowder was ordered to register as a sex offender,” Glendale Police said at the time. “Glendale Police confirmed that he had not registered as a sex offender with our department and was in violation. He was arrested again today.”
Michaela Witter, who captured the Barnes & Noble encounter and shared it to TikTok, blasted the system that allowed Crowder to be released just three days after his initial arrest: “Is this real? I think he maybe spent three days in jail … They can’t do anything until he’s done something really bad to someone, and I’m honestly scared that that person is gonna be me.”
Crowder is currently being held pending his next hearing.
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