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Search for that first apartment turns sour

Two women are suing their landlord over conditions.

By NICOLE BARDO-COLON
Published July 11, 2007

ST. PETERSBURG - Friends since their diaper days, two young adults ventured out for their first apartment together and were met with what they say were uninhabitable conditions.

Rebecca Kottwitz, 18, and Jennifer Chicoine, 19, had lived down the street from each other since they were babies. The search for an apartment included checking out The Flyer, a classified ad publication, where they found a place and called to make arrangements to see it.

Earnell Samuel Jr. owns the property at 1001 Crescent Lake Drive in north St. Petersburg, along with several other properties.

Kottwitz said they went to see Apartment No. 4 around 8 p.m. on June 28. "Everything looked fine at night," Kottwitz said.

She said they met the landlord, Samuel, at a gas station and gave him a $575 deposit. Chicoine signed the lease a week later but did not get a copy. Kottwitz didn't sign the lease because she was at work.

"He said he would come back by for me to sign the lease and he didn't come back by when we told him about the problems." Kottwitz said.

Both Samuel and Kottwitz said an agreement had been made to lower the down payment by $100 if the girls would clean the apartment themselves.

But over that weekend as they moved in with the help of Kottwitz's mother, they were confronted with a host of problems.

"We saw how horrible the conditions were," Kottwitz said.

She said there were holes in the floor, the ceiling was caved in, two burners on the stove were missing and there were maggots in the refrigerator. In addition, the AC unit caught fire when they turned on the electricity in the apartment, said Kottwitz, adding that the hot water was not working.

"When we contacted him and told him what happened, he said it was our responsibility to replace it," Kottwitz said.

The girls cleaned out the refrigerator and the apartment, started putting food in the refrigerator and moving their stuff in.

A few days later, the maggots returned, Kottwitz said.

"That's when we decided that would not be a place for us to live," Kottwitz said. "We lost like $400 worth of groceries."

The girls contacted Samuel, requesting early termination of the lease, but he refused saying he did not default on his agreement as a landlord.

According to Samuel, the girls never asked for their deposit back.

"No, they didn't," he said. "Their application and lease was incomplete and that's where we stopped at."

He said they still owed a balance on the deposit.

Kottwitz said they decided to contact the city's codes inspection, fire inspector and the police.

Anthony Rivers, an inspector with the St. Petersburg Codes Compliance Assistance, responded to the scene and inspected the apartment again.

According to a document filed by Rivers, he referred the violations to a previous case still open under the same address in May.

There were six code violations filed under a different tenant, Anthony Brown, on May 11. Rivers filed an additional four code violations on his inspection July 6.

The violations include: insect/pest extermination, heating equipment control, electric disrepair/unsafe, walls, ceiling, kitchen floor impervious.

Fire Inspector Mario Littman also investigated the apartment on July 6. According to a document from St. Petersburg Fire and Rescue, he found 21 code violations including hard-wire smoke alarms, unsafe wiring and the unsafe housekeeping methods.

"I had no knowledge of any repairs," Samuel said. "It is inhabitable. Any repairs will be rectified immediately once I am notified in writing."

Samuel said he never received any letters in the last case or this one. He said he evicted the last tenant because of failure to pay rent but said it had nothing to do with any repairs.

"He's going to try and evict me," Brown said. "Because he didn't want to do the repairs."

Brown said he experienced similar circumstances as Kottwitz and Chicoine.

"He should have told us about these problems that were already in there before we moved in," Brown said.

Kottwitz said she plans to take Samuel to small claims court to get their deposit back as well as money for their groceries, court costs and attorney fees.

"I just hope he doesn't do this to someone else," she said.

Nicole Bardo-Colon can be reached at 893-8779 or nbardo-colon@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 10, 2007, 20:44:23]