The handyman known to residents of one Los Angeles building as Mark Clemens was actually Christian Basham, a Washington man accused of second-degree child rape and presumed dead since 2009 when he was allegedly seen jumping off a bridge in Washington.
Residents of a Los Angeles building were planning to celebrate the life of their longtime maintenance worker after his death last month.
Then, they learned that the man they knew as Mark Clemens was Christian Robert Basham, a man charged with second-degree child rape in 2008 and presumed dead as of 2009 when an eyewitness claimed to have seen him jumping off the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington, according to the Bremerton Police Department (BPD).
A body was never found, but his car and a suicide note were discovered near the bridge, according to police.
Basham had entered a plea of not guilty and been released on $350,000 bail at the time, says Capt. Aaron Elton of the BPD.
Now, many residents are grappling with the notion that a suspected criminal had been living in their building for over a decade and even had keys to their apartments.
"I didn’t get to know him on a deep level, just mostly on a professional level, especially at first," resident Tommy Cuellar tells Inside Edition Digital. "All I really knew about him was that he liked 80’s music, had a black cat named Ra (after the sun god), and he liked cats in general."
Cuellar adds: "I can’t recall the very first time I ever met him, but the times I needed things fixed in my apartment (electrical outlet not working, toilet not flushing, etc.), he performed the duties pretty quickly. But there wasn’t really a friendship, just a maintenance guy coming in to fix something in my place, me saying thank you, and that was it."
Basham stopped working as the building maintenance worker in 2022 when the building was sold and a new management team took over, but the handyman continued to live in his apartment.
The apartment is not all Basham held onto, either, said Cuellar.
"I still think about how he had keys to all of our apartments, and when the new owners bought the building, they didn’t take them from him," says Cuellar. "I found this out last year when my mom passed away and I paid him to feed my cats while I was out of town for her funeral. He mentioned that I didn’t need to lend him a copy of my key because he still had the master key."
Cuellar also says that Basham's employment was not confined to the building.
"Around the time that I was still moving apartments, he asked me if I wanted a couple of theater chairs that were being thrown out at the Ace Hotel where he was doing some work," says Cuellar. "They looked cool, so I took them."
Inside Edition Digital made multiple attempts to reach out to the Ace Hotel but they did not respond to a request for comment.
Cuellar also recalls one interaction with Basham that he finds somewhat unsettling in retrospect.
At the time, Basham lived on the floor above Cuellar in the building and had a patio with a skylight that looked into Cuellar's apartment.
"My skylight was open, and I was entertaining guests and one of them was playing music in that room. The next day, he mentioned he enjoyed some of the music that he could hear coming from my apartment and asked me what music was played, and I replied that it wasn’t mine so I didn’t recall," says Cuellar. "He then said that he had wanted to Shazam the music through my skylight, but he thought it would be weird if we looked up and saw his hand holding a cellphone hovering above us."
There were other behaviors that Cuellar now looks back on and sees as possible clues that Basham was attempting to hide his identity.
"He almost always wore sunglasses, even in the hallway," says Cuellar. "He was also a really heavy smoker, and I could smell the smoke and hear him coughing loudly through his door when I became his next-door neighbor."
Cuellar says this all happened at a difficult time for him, having lost his mother and cat in the year prior, and he is now left with many questions.
"I wonder how he was hired, and why there was no background check, especially for someone who was given a master key. As terrible as his accused crime is, he could’ve just as easily been a serial killer, and his possession of a master key would have been the same," says Cuellar. "It also makes me question how he was paid if he used a fake Social Security number, or what arrangements were made for him to have this occupation for so many years. I also wonder about the supposed witness to his jumping from the bridge. Hopefully, everything will come to light soon."
Inside Edition Digital obtained the judgment from Basham's divorce in 2004, which reveals he owned a home in the California city of Costa Mesa.
His wife got the home as part of the judgment and soon after, he moved to Washington.
The divorce lists irreconcilable differences as the cause for divorce, with his ex-wife filing the initial petition for dissolution.
Basham had lived in Orange County since his teenage years before moving to Washington, where records show he purchased property in Bremerton.
How Basham died remains unclear, with the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner still determining the cause of death.
The medical examiner's office first discovered Mark Clemens was Basham and notified authorities in Washington.
Those authorities say that while the criminal case against Basham is closed, they will be investigating his movements since that day in 2009 when he faked his death.
When asked if they would be looking into the individual who claimed to have seen Basham jump off the bridge, Capt. Elton said: "We intend to attempt to determine whether or not anyone assisted Basham in evading prosecution."
Inside Edition Digital attempted to contact the woman last listed as living in Basham's California apartment, but she did not respond to a request for comment.
Related Stories
