On the south side of the 134 Freeway in Pasadena, amid the brush and the dirt and detritus, there is an empty tub of Dreyer’s vanilla ice cream and an empty drink cup from Subway.
They appear to be litter, perhaps cast out of fast-moving cars by careless freeway drivers.
In fact, they hide strategically placed security cameras aimed at capturing the man some in Pasadena have named the “Piss Bandit.”
The mystery man has a penchant for placing full bottles of human urine on a specific Pasadena Water & Power electrical box on Colorado Boulevard. For years, he has deposited full bottles of pee (unscientific but newspaper-safe term) atop a seemingly random electrical box.
That behavior is odd enough. But what about the two self-appointed documentarians who have devoted themselves to identifying the urine bottler and understanding his ways? The story is a confluence of classic California weirdness and the Hollywood show business hustlers always there to track it.
Bottles of urine are left on an electrical box.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Derek Milton enters stage left, dressed as a construction worker in a bright yellow vest and a hard hat. Like many fake construction workers in Los Angeles, Milton is a filmmaker. He has come to the side of the 134 Freeway on this sunny morning in September with Grant Yansura — also a filmmaker and owner of a skateboard company — whom Milton has disguised as his “recently divorced, disheveled project manager.”
It is very important that they dress as a construction team because they need to be incognito to investigate Urinegate. First, they don’t want to be mistaken by passing drivers and pedestrians for the person who’s actually leaving the bottles. That would be a real situation. Second, it’s funny.
Derek Milton holds one of his camouflaged security cameras.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
And it needs to be funny, because the ultimate goal here is to turn the bottles of urine into Internet gold.
The disguises are one of the recurring bits in Milton and Yansura’s six-part, deadpan-comedy-meets-true-crime documentary series on TikTok about the urine depositor (think HBO’s “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst”) (on second thought, don’t). The short films have made minor stars of the two filmmakers; the first installment drew more than 6 million views, and their subsequent videos have racked up millions as well.
They’ve been recognized in airports and restaurants, although their fans don’t always remember their names.
“You’re the piss guy,” fans say when spotting one of them in the wild. Milton and Yansura try to remain humble.
The ongoing documentary has a simple premise. Milton and Yansura hope to figure out who the urine bottler is and why he does what he does. They insist their goal is not to publicly identify the urinator, but to understand his motives.
Milton and Yansura say they believe it is one person, a man. The city of Pasadena also said it is investigating a man, whom officials did not identify.
Since the bottles started appearing around 2022, Milton said, multiple theories about the source and purpose have been asserted, then discarded like so many bottles of…
Some thought the man — and people invariably assume it’s a man — was providing clean urine for people to pass drug tests. Others thought the urine contained liquefied drugs. Some didn’t believe the urine was actually urine.
After leaving security cameras camouflaged as discarded containers, Derek Milton, right, and Grant Yansura check their camera angles on a phone.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Yansura and Milton sought to dispel those doubts by performing a urinalysis and a drug test on one of the urine bottles. They determined it was “clean, healthy piss,” as they say in their video.
Why were they willing to do a urinalysis on a stranger’s pee? Yansura suffers from anosmia, Milton says in the video, meaning he has no sense of smell. And also, funny.
“Grant was in the zone,” Milton said in part four of the series. “He flawlessly completed the urinalysis.”
Yansura completed the drug test “masterfully.”
“I think we both do pretty funny, weird things,” Yansura said. “Him and I both like to go way too far into detail [about] seemingly mundane or not-that-important things.”
I simply had to know more, so last week I joined them. The videos were not enough. I needed to see the receptacles of urine with my own eyes. Milton asked if I would be comfortable wearing a construction pinny. Sure, I said, why not.
We walked across Colorado Boulevard, and there they were, glinting in the Pasadena sunshine, 13 bottles full of liquid in varying hues — from a worryingly dark amber to a hydrated, light gold. It was weeks’ worth of urine.
The reasons we were there were twofold. Yansura and Milton were installing new cameras inside the Subway cup, the Dreyer’s ice cream tub and a fake shrub. They would place the cameras in the vicinity of the electrical box in hopes of capturing video of the man behind the bottles.
Three types of cameras were installed (and this next part is important): a Reolink Go PT Plus, a Reolink Go PT Ultra and a Reolink Go Ranger PT. It’s important because Milton thinks it’s funny to use the full names of the cameras every time he mentions them in his videos, like they’re British royalty.
The second reason we were there was to see the bandit’s handiwork. The Pasadena Department of Water & Power had installed a pyramid of metal atop the electrical box in the hope of using hostile architecture to end the bandit’s reign of liquid terror. Days later, the pyramid had been removed, possibly through the use of a crowbar, and bottles of urine once again befouled the box.
“This person removed/destroyed (vandalism) the pyramid and placed more bottles there,” said Lisa Derderian, a spokeswoman for the city of Pasadena, in an email.
The department has since fabricated a new pyramid, she said. “Seems to be working so far.”
Obviously, not everybody in the community found the urine situation amusing.
Complaints have poured in from residents and a councilman. Police are investigating, according to Derderian.
“Hey funny guy,” one person had scribbled in a handwritten note affixed to the electrical box. “If I catch you leaving your piss here, I will make you drink every last drop! You will have wished I called the cops! I am watching you and you don’t know who I am, but I know who you are. You have been warned!”
The note was months old. The bandit remains as active as ever.
Others found the situation endlessly amusing.
“It’s pretty fantastic,” said Daniel Rossman, who pulled over to the side of the road to join us when he recognized Milton and Yansura, whose videos he has been watching religiously with his wife.
“A lot of us have driven by and wondered, but I appreciate you’re doing the labor to answer the unanswered questions,” he told the filmmakers. “Real life is strange sometimes.”
Derek Milton shares a video of the culprit that he captured from a hidden camera.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Communication with the mysterious urine depositor has proven difficult because of his complete lack of interest in speaking with Milton or Yansura.
The filmmakers have captured footage of him more than once. In the first instance, the camera shows the hands of a man eerily reaching over the freeway wall in the dark and arranging numerous bottles of urine on the electrical box.
Another time they installed a ReoLink Go PT Plus in the tree above where the mystery man stands when he places his bottles. The camera had a function through which Yansura and Milton could watch the area live and speak to whoever was there. When the man appeared late one night, the filmmakers’ hearts began to race.
Yansura, who was watching the action on his phone, was not able to communicate. He said he was drunk (or as the Brits say, pissed) at a casino, and it was loud there. It fell on Milton to make first contact.
“What’s up, dude?” Milton said. Classic.
The man looked up briefly, then continued working.
“I would like to interview you. Can you hear me?” Milton continued.
The man froze. Then he looked back up slowly, stood on top of the fence and removed the camera. He didn’t say a word.
He seemed to have no interest in speaking with them, much less revealing his identity.
Another time, Milton had left a board with questions written on it and a Sharpie for the bandit to answer questions such as “How and why did you choose this electrical box?” and “Do you have an artist name?” The bandit returned to leave more urine, but did not leave any answers.
His identity remains a mystery. Milton and Yansura are working on their seventh video in the series.
Despite the bandit’s unwillingness to interact with the filmmakers, Milton does believe the man has watched the viral videos.
For years, the bandit wrote, “urine” or “human urine” on the bottles of urine. Since Milton and Yansura started posting their “Piss Bandit” videos online, for the first time, the man has changed what he writes on the bottles.
“Human piss,” they now read.