Meet the Breaking Bad tour guide who regularly scrapes pizzas off an elderly couple's roof
Frank Sandoval usually spends part of his time driving enthusiastic Breaking Bad fans around Albuquerque, N.M., and part of it scraping pizzas off an elderly couple's roof.
Sandoval runs Breaking Bad RV Tours, and one of his regular stops is the house that belongs to science teacher-turned-meth dealer Walter White in the hit AMC TV show.
In the show's third season, a frustrated White tosses a pizza onto his garage roof after having a spat with his wife.
Sandoval said re-enactments of the scene by fans has become such a common problem that he brings a ladder on his tours so he can retrieve the pizzas for the elderly couple who live there.
"I would say it's a regular basis," Sandoval told As It Happens host Carol Off. "A couple months ago we did pull five pizzas off the roof."
One time he almost caught the pie-tossers red-handed.
"We actually pulled up and saw some people who had just tossed a pizza on the roof, and I literally chased them down to get their licence plate, but I couldn't catch them," he said.
But Sandoval's pizza-scraping and vandal-chasing days should soon be over.
The family is erecting a six-foot wrought iron fence around their property, Joanne Quintana, whose mother owns the house, told local news station KOB 4.
They also hope the fence will stop people from lurking on their property day and night, taking selfies on their front step and, oddly enough, stealing their landscaping rocks for souvenirs.
"I know one time I pulled up and we had a full tour. I saw a guy on the property and the homeowners weren't home and he was putting rocks in bags and refused to move," Sandoval said. "So we literally physically removed him and called the police."
Sandoval said most fans are great — but a few bad anchovies can spoil the whole pie.
"I would say about 95 to 97 per cent of the people are very good," he said.
"It's that three to five per cent of folks who really don't get it. I don't know if they just think the show is real or they have the intent to, 'Hey, I'm going to do this and nobody's going to stop me.'"
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Even though the house is a hot ticket on his tours, Sandoval supports the fence.
"It's sad that it has to come to that, but now they're fearing for their safety," he said.
Quintana told KOB 4 the fence is a last-ditch effort to stop the fanfare that only seems to have grown since Breaking Bad ended in 2013.
"We don't want to gate ourselves in," Quintana said. "We're the ones who's being locked up. We did nothing wrong."