If you’re going to break in to find room and board, you might as well sleep in luxury.
One woman has become the Hamptons’ very own real life Goldilocks. The woman has been walking into houses in the posh village of Westhampton Beach, bedding down and spooking residents who pay as much as $250,000 for a summer rental.
According to Westhampton Beach Police reports, Peace Ofoego, 32, has been busted three times for trespassing since the end of May. Although, she has actually entered seven properties in the village.
In some cases, home owners declined to press charges, which was a nice gesture.However, it seems to make Ofoego think she can repeat her mistakes of breaking and entering.
She was first spotted in Westhampton Beach on Memorial Day weekend, when a resident reported to police “a black female wearing a black trench coat and sandals” wandering the backyard construction site of his four-bedroom rental property about a mile away from the village’s train station.
Ofoego told police on May 29 that she had no identification or credit cards because she had recently been robbed while living in Washington, DC.
She said she had traveled to New York City a few days earlier, and had boarded the Long Island Railroad to Westhampton Beach, a quiet seaside village of 1,900 residents, to find a hotel room near the ocean.
After that first suspicious incident report, police helped Ofoego find a local homeless shelter where she said she wanted to charge her computer and transfer funds to an account.
But the statuesque wanderer, who is often dressed completely in black, didn’t stay put.
Days later, on June 2, a resident found Ofoego on the deck of her sprawling $275,000 eight-bedroom rental on tony Dune Road, and called police. This time officers charged Ofoego with criminal trespass.
She had trespassed through an unlocked gate that leads from the beach and entered the house through the unlocked back deck, where she seemed content to lounge while waiting for police to show up.
“Subject stated she was staying at a house down the road and entered the stated residence to ask somebody about a restaurant to eat at,” said the police report.
Just two days after that report, on June 4, Ofoego was spotted “staying” in the pool house of another Dune Road property that rents for $34,999 a month, according to a recent listing. John Mallon, owner of the home, told officers that while he wanted to document the incident, he did not want to press charges.
While an officer was attempting to find a local homeless shelter for Ofoego, “Peace began walking away,” the officer wrote in his report, adding that he warned her that if she kept wandering into village homes she would again be arrested for trespassing. “She left the area on foot,” wrote the officer.
Ofoego spends most days on her feet, walking through the village and along the beach. Sometimes she wears the black trench coat and a black knit beanie under the blazing afternoon sun.
Since she showed up in the serene village, where many residents don’t bother locking their doors, police have recommended them to do so.
On the Westhampton Beach Community Forum Facebook page, residents have reported several sightings of Ofoego, on the village’s back roads, on Main Street, at a gazebo where bands play in the summertime and at the local marina, where one resident spotted her dancing in the early morning at the end of May.
So far, Ofoego has refused all offers of help from the local police. However, she reportedly sometimes reaches out to locals when she finds herself in a bind.
“A few weeks ago, she approached me in Lidl asking for help,” wrote Marie Costelli. “She needed money to pay for her groceries. As I was handing her some cash, which she took, a man who may have been the store manager asked her to leave. I felt sorry for her. I hope she gets the help she needs.”
Another local was in the village courtroom during Ofoego’s appearance on trespassing charges earlier this month. She has already had two court appearances in the village, on July 6 and July 13.
At both hearings, she refused a public defender, and said she intends to defend herself. Her trespassing case has been adjourned until July 27.
“She was in court the other day, the same time I was, and she was arguing with the judge,” said Liam Anthony DeFronzo on the community Facebook page. “It seemed to me she is angry with where she is in life and with the system. Ultimately, it seems like she’s looking for a place to sleep, but of course you never know what she might do and it’s not acceptable to break into homes. Does she truly want help in finding some sort of shelter and is doing this as a cry for help? I don’t know, but I felt compelled to help her the other day in the court room.”
Days earlier, when officers tried to serve her with a subpoena to appear in court, she told them they were harassing her. “I will sue you,” she said.
Ofoego was spotted walking through the parking lot of the local firehouse. Carrying a colorful beach bag, she told a reporter that she was born in Nigeria, but has lived in the US for the last 13 years. She said she initially came to the US when she was 19 years old, settling in Baton Rouge, La., where she began studying medical science at Southern University.
Ofoego added that her father is a journalist in Nigeria, and that she was educated at boarding schools before coming to the US. She said she had left an abusive husband in Florida and made her way to Washington, DC, then New York, where she was violently pushed down subway stairs in May. The reporter could find no record of the incident. She also said that her parents in Nigeria were aware of her predicament but could do nothing.
“All I want is just some simple kindness from strangers,” she said as she walked away. “But no one cares about me.”
Ofoego told police in May that she has no friends or family on Long Island, but has at least one relative in Louisiana, an aunt. When police called Ugoo Onyenekwu, she told them that Ofoego was “moving around looking for a location where she could regain custody of her children who are currently in California,” according to a police report.
It’s not clear how many children Ofoego has, but on Nov. 4, 2020, police in Orlando, Fla., stopped her for “failure to register a motor vehicle” and, according to Orange County court records, she had “seven juvenile passengers” in a car. Police said she produced “a foreign passport” as identification and failed to show up at her arraignment. In 2017, she was stopped by police in Lake County, Fla., and charged with driving without a license. Ofoego claimed that she never had one, according to public records.
She has lived in several places in Florida over the last few years, and worked with Marquis Duvuall Hudson, her husband, for a company called Meticulous Cleaning Services in Boca Raton. Hudson, now 40, was charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a Florida cop in 2017. He was sentenced to 11 months in prison, court records show.
A year later, he allegedly struck a newly pregnant Ofoego. A day after Christmas in 2018, Ofoego, called police in Pompano Beach and said that five days earlier, she had a fight with Hudson while they were putting cleaning supplies in a storage locker. Hudson “was accusing her of trying to leave the country” and the two got into an argument during which “Marquis grabbed her around her throat and began choking her.” She told police that she was having trouble breathing and nearly passed out.
In Westhampton Beach, Ofoego’s final encounter with the police took place on June 24 at a”quintessential beachfront estate” that features seven bedrooms and was listed for rent at $280,000 for July and August.
Ofoego walked into a second-story bedroom, startling the owner. Police were called and arrested her; while they were processing her paperwork at the Westhampton Beach police department later that evening, Ofoego told cops that they had been mistaken. She wasn’t trespassing, she said.
“I went inside to look at the rental,” she said. “You just want to arrest me. All I did was look for a rental.”
Goldilocks? not hardly. Send her back where she came from, we have enough of our own homeless. who sleep on streets..