SAN DIEGO — A large unoccupied house at 625 Wrelton Drive in Bird Rock has been heavily vandalized and covered in graffiti. It sits on a cliffside overlooking the Tourmaline Beach parking lot.
“The back of the building is all covered with graffiti,” said neighbor Jim Waddell. “If you go inside, it’s all graffiti’d up and wrecked.”
“I don’t like it,” said neighbor Tamlin Henahan. “It can be a crack house. It can be anything. It’s not safe.”
Neighbors say the abandoned home has become a graffiti magnet and drug den.
“It’s not just the graffiti,” said Waddell. “I worry about the young kids that are going in there, ya know, drugs and partying.”
In August of 2019, the previous owner, Alex Jvirblis, passed away at the age of 82. A few months later, authorities found illegally stored chemicals in the back of the house that were so volatile, they had to be detonated on site.
“Ba-boom, ba-boom, ya know, and they were setting off the chemicals,” said Waddell.
“I stepped out of my car and it went boom,” said Henahan. “I was very scared.”
The home sold in July of 2020 for $2.7 million dollars, at which point, some new renovations and roofing work began on the house.
“Suddenly everything stopped, so for the last year or so the place has been vacant and a bunch of kids have gotten in there now and graffiti’d the whole place up,” said Waddell. “They’re partying in there and I don’t know what the hell they’re doing. It’s not great.”
“Allowing private property to fall into this kind of condition is unacceptable in this neighborhood frankly, and in any neighborhood in our city,” said Councilmember Joe LaCava.
“What we’ve done is be responsive in terms of alerting code enforcement about the situation. I know there are efforts being made right now to reach out to the property owner to understand their situation and then we can become proactive to remove that graffiti that’s so visible from the beach area and make sure that nobody is using that house inappropriately.”
Waddell has lived on Wrelton Drive for 25 years, and he says neighbors are frustrated.
“I mean, these are multi-million dollar homes and it looks like hell from the back,” said Waddell. “So we’d like the graffiti to go away and have them figure out a way to secure the building.”
“Long term what we hope is that the property owner will step up and take care of the property, complete whatever repairs were underway, and begin to resolve the situation,” said Councilmember Joe LaCava.
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