After Miya Marcano’s likely death, scrutiny over who holds apartment master keys

Armando Caballero, the prime suspect in Miya Marcano’s disappearance, was a maintenance worker where Marcano lived, worked and was last seen, which has people questioning their safety when it comes to others having master keys to their apartments.

Caballero, who was found dead last week, was also a maintenance worker at another complex, where a woman believes he threw a weight through her window because she would not go out with him. In the hours after Miya Marcano’s body was presumed to be found, people all across social media began calling for maintenance workers to stop having master key fobs to just anyone’s apartment in their respective complexes.

WINK News safety and security specialist Rich Kolko says maintenance workers who show signs of inappropriate advances on a resident, like Caballero did, should be reprimanded or even terminated. Above all, he says to always take matters into your own hands.

“When it comes to security, a lot of times we rely on other people to provide that security for us,” Kolko said. “That’s not the best way to do it. The best way to do it is take control of the situation yourself: Provide an extra lock on your door, use a door stopper, make sure if somebody knocks on your door you know who it is. And one thing you can always do is make sure you’re talking to somebody on the phone or texting someone on the phone.”

Kolko says that, at the very least, more extreme background checks need to take place, but even that isn’t so easy.

“Background checks rely on data that’s available in a computer, so if the data isn’t there, you can’t trust the reliability of what would likely be a very quick background check on anybody working in this industry,” Kolko said. “While it’s a good idea, a lot of the apartments just aren’t going to pay that extra expense to check the employees out.”