‘Jealous’ guy busted for planting cam to eye gal
A PROFESSIONAL photographer from Queens has been accused of planting a GoPro camera in his female roommate’s bedroom, and the victim believes he started recording her out of jealousy.
Cops arrested Benjamin Muri, 36, on Wednesday, after the victim said he placed the camera on a bookshelf in her Long Island City bedroom last month.
Footage from the camera shows him positioning it, and a day later, he sent the woman a text message admitting, “I was wrong. I am sorry for what I did,” according to a criminal complaint.
Cops charged him with attempted unlawful surveillance, a misdemeanor.
Muri, who formerly lived in Rhode Island, met the 35-yearold victim through a roommate search web site in April 2016, the woman told the Daily News.
The two became roomies and close friends, she said.
“We started to do everything together. We had similar interests,” said the victim, who would only identify herself as Victoria.
Victoria helped Muri find business clients among her circle of friends, but one thing she didn’t do was get romantically involved with him, she said.
“It seems along the way that there were tiny red flags,” Victoria said. “He would become quite jealous.”
In March, she invited a male friend over to her bedroom, which shares a door with Muri’s room. Victoria and the friend then saw Muri slip his iPhone through the doorway “and he started taking pictures, and so I confronted him,” she said.
That ended their friendship, but Victoria couldn’t afford to move, or pay the rent if he left, she said.
On Nov. 2, she came home at about 3:30 a.m. after a night out with friends, she said.
“I was just decompressing, and I was sitting at an ottoman at the end of my bed and just chilling, and then I noticed the blinking light on the bookshelf,” she said.
She walked toward the red light, and saw the camera. Muri had hung a piece of tape off of the camera in an attempt to obscure the light, she said.
Victoria confronted him immediately, yelling at him, and when she accessed the camera’s memory card, she found more than an hour of footage recorded.
“He said via text that he’s done this to me once or twice, which is unnerving,” she said.
The next day he acted as if nothing had happened, even after she told him, “You need to sleep in a different place tonight. You’re not sleeping here.
“That denial was so hurtful,” she said.
That led to the call to the police, and Muri’s arrest.
A judge ordered Muri released on his own recognizance on Wednesday.
He was also barred from contacting his roommate.
Muri wouldn’t speak about his arrest when contacted Saturday.
“I have no comment on it,” he said about the charges. “It’s really a complicated story right now.”