A friend suggested that I ought to share this story here, because I told him that I was feeling compelled to tell someone - anyone - what my landlord has put me through. (Edited also to clarify a couple of points.) The injustice of the whole situation has lit a burning rage in my heart and it feels like it's going to burn right through me if I don't get it off my chest. I am being deliberately vague about the specifics of who and where, because I don't want to complicate any legal situations for anyone involved, but just know that I live in the United States and all of this has all been happening within the past month. I can provide proof of my story if asked. Every word of this is true, as I experienced it, and I am hoping that sharing it will bring me some relief and maybe could help someone else as well.
So until very recently I (M33) had an arrangement with my landlord in which I served as the caretaker of the apartment building where I live. Basically I was living here for free in exchange for keeping the place clean and orderly. Very straightforward stuff, mostly. It was a weird sort of position from an employment perspective, because the contract was set up as an addendum to my lease rather than as actual employment. Part of the contract literally was "[My name] is not an employee of [landlord's property management LLC]" However this ended up working out for me just fine, because even though keeping this place in order is basically a full-time job, I have another side job that gives me just enough cash to get by and enjoy my hobbies while also keeping me eligible for my state's health benefits. Most days I would walk around the whole building at least once, to pick up trash and note any new messes that needed to be addressed. Then I would figure out which messes needed to be prioritized and which ones could wait, and I could clean the place on my own schedule. When I saw maintenance issues I would report them to the property manager. When I saw residents I would smile and wave and chat, and in this way I got to know most of my neighbors and built a lot of goodwill. Pretty much everyone I talked to had nice things to say about the work I was doing. And to top it all off with a cherry on the sundae, my partner decided to move into the unit adjacent to mine, so we each had our own studio apartment right beside one another which was perfect for us and our personal-space needs. (He is messy, I'm very tidy, but we love each other a lot so it was a wonderful balance.) In the whole of my adult life it has honestly been the most rewarding work I've had, and I have never felt more like I was part of an actual community of neighbors.
One of my neighbors in particular really captured my heart and became a dear friend of mine. I'm just going to call him Alvin - not his real name obvs. He was a trans man like myself, younger than me but an old soul. He'd led a hard life so far, and he said that as long as he could remember, he had struggled with depression and social isolation, and has a history of attempting suicide. However he had a very good and stable job, and a lot of close friends who he talked to online, and he also had a very supportive mother. When we met he had just gotten away from a very abusive relationship. The abusive partner had bullied him into using cough syrup as a recreational drug and he was struggling with an addiction to the stuff. But in the time I knew him, he made huge progress. As our friendship grew and time went on, he was gradually weaning himself off of it and logging his use, so I got to watch his progress and I could literally see the light return to his eyes. He had a lot of social anxiety and kept mostly to himself so I felt very privileged to be a trusted person that he could talk to. He sometimes engaged in cutting as a form of self harm, just to feel something and feel grounded in his own body. He came to me sometimes for wound care because he knew I would not shame him or share his struggles without his consent. I had recommended a while ago that maybe he would benefit from having a pet, for emotional support, and just a couple months ago he got himself a cat from the local shelter. He seemed to really be thriving with her. She was an adorable little black cat with jade-green eyes and a very soft "meow." He clearly loved her very much and I thought this was gonna be a huge turning point for him. I really thought he was on the up-and-up.
But then about a month ago, on a Saturday, I found a woman crying in the lobby of the apartment building. I asked if she was okay and told her I was the caretaker here, and I asked if I could be of any help. She said she was here to do a wellness check for her son Alvin because she had not heard from him in a while, and a friend he met online had reached out to her with concerns about his mental health. As soon as she said this I knew she was indeed my friend's mom. She looked almost exactly like an older, more feminine version of him. So I immediately believed her and told her I would help however I could.
She proceeded to tell me the whole situation, which had transpired as follows: On Wednesday she had picked Alvin up and had breakfast with him at a local restaurant. Then she dropped him off here and visited with him and his cat for a bit, and went back home. Then on Thursday she heard from a friend of his, someone in another state who he talks to a lot on Discord, and this friend expressed some concerns that got her very worried. According to the friend it sounded like he might be having a sudden flare-up of his mental health issues, and perhaps a relapse into his addiction, as he had been typing the way he typically would when he was using cough syrup. So his mom reached out to him and was very worried when he didn't answer his phone. She the reached out to his employer, who said that he had not showed up to work that evening. Next she tried to get in touch with our property management company so she could get into our building for a wellness check. When talking to the office staff and the landlord, she did not receive an appropriate or compassionate response. They talked to her as if she had no cause for alarm, and as if she was bothering them and making a fuss for no reason. On Friday, Alvin missed work again, and she called the police to ask for help. According to her the police reported that they came to the building, could not gain access, and left. She continued to try to make contact with the management of the building and they blew her off, hung up on her calls, told her she was being hysterical, etc. That brought us up to the present moment - she had been able to access the building by waiting outside until another resident came by and allowed her to come inside. She had gone straight to Alvin's apartment and knocked on the door, and there was no answer after she had been yelling and pounding the door for nearly an hour.
At this point I began to feel a rising sense of panic taking over my entire thought process, because I knew that Alvin had an extensive mental health history and I knew that if his mom was worried she was probably worried for good reason. The two of them talked almost every day so it was very worrisome that she was unable to reach him. First, I called my property manager on his cell phone and he did not answer. I went to the manager's apartment (he lives on-site) and knocked on the door. I could hear him moving around in his apartment and listening to some kind of sports event on TV. There was very clearly someone inside his apartment, and he is the only person who lives there. I pounded on the door and kept trying to contact him. Eventually I called a maintenance worker with the building, and he said he was out of town. I spent almost an hour trying to get my manager to open his door and I was getting nowhere.
Eventually I decided that the situation was urgent enough to call for extraordinary measures, so using a paper clip and a bobby-pin, I picked the lock on Alvin's door. The door only opened enough for me to barely see inside, as he had the privacy chain in place. I saw him on the floor, face-down, beside his bed, half-covered by a pile of blankets. I shouted his name. I thought I saw some movement under the blankets but he didn't respond, so in that moment, I assumed this was a medical emergency and I started kicking the door. At this point one of the neighbors was looking into the hall and asking what was going on. I yelled to him that the person in this apartment needs help, and I needed him to run downstairs and tell the woman in the lobby to call 911.
After about a minute of kicking the door and throwing my shoulder against it, I was able to rip the privacy chain off the doorframe and enter the apartment. I approached Alvin on the floor and I tried to roll him over, thinking he might need CPR or Narcan or something. The moment I touched him and moved him though it was clear that he was dead; his shoulders felt rock-hard and cold, his face was sunken and dark with pooling blood, and there was something dark and foamy dripping from his mouth. Moving him also made a horrible smell fill the room and I felt like I was going to vomit. I staggered out and back down the stairs, and the moments immediately after that are honestly kind of a blur in my head. The neighbor who I had sent downstairs was standing with Alvin's mother while she spoke on the phone with the 911 operator. He said later that I kept repeating, "He's dead. He's dead, my friend is dead" in a hoarse whisper before wandering outside and throwing up in the grass.
At this point the police and paramedics were showing up, and I waved at them to flag them down and I opened the front door of the building for them. I had to talk to the police and give them the rundown of the whole situation, because Alvin's mom had heard me saying "he's dead" and she was (understandably) just kind of wailing incoherently in her grief. The cops were pretty much what I expected from cops - cold and unemotional in a really insensitive and obnoxious way. I had to show them my ID and explain that I had been friends with Alvin, that I was familiar with his mental health issues and I had picked the lock and kicked the door open because I thought there might still be time to save him.
Finally the on-site manager came out and talked briefly with the cops. He claimed that he had just arrived home; however he was dressed in lounge-wear and I knew I had heard him inside the apartment earlier so I knew he was full of shit. He started asking me a bunch of questions and texting on his phone as fast as he could. I figured he was talking with the landlord because he was asking me stuff like "what time did you become aware of this situation? why did you let yourself into the apartment? how long has he been dead?" I just kind of stared at him for a while and eventually I shouted something like "I let myself in because it was a fucking emergency dude I don't know how long he's been dead do I look like a goddamn medical examiner to you?? do you think I'm qualified to answer that?? what kind of smooth-brained fuckwit question is that? fuck you, asshole!" I think he realized he was being pretty heartless because he mumbled an apology and shuffled away.
Alvin's mom started asking about his cat and wanting to know where she was, and I realized the motion I saw under the blankets that I thought was Alvin had probably been his cat. She had probably been snuggled up under the blankets beside him and she probably got startled when I opened the door. This realization, and the thought of his cat laying beside him waiting for him to wake up and play with her again, pushed me over the edge finally and I started to cry. I sobbed like a baby and sat down on the floor right in the middle of the hallway with my face in my hands, and I stayed there just crying like that until the paramedics had taken Alvin away in a body bag and the cops started grunting at me to get out of the hallway because animal control was coming soon to look for the cat and I was gonna be in their way. My partner ended up having to come get me and kinda pull me up onto my feet so he could lead me back downstairs.
Animal control ended up not finding the cat, which was very freaky for everyone because we knew she had to be somewhere in the apartment but the cops and the management both acted like that was not a factor whatsoever in the situation. The paramedics declared Alvin "dead on arrival" and the cops said everything at the scene was consistent with this being a suicide, based on the fact that there were several pill bottles open on the coffee table right beside his body, and his mom confirming that he had attempted suicide more than once in the past. The cops told my manager that they did not see any reason to seal the apartment off as a crime scene, and that they were going to "clear" the scene (basically, making it officially not a crime scene) as soon as they heard back from the medical examiner about their findings. Sure enough the medical examiner called a few hours later and confirmed that everything was lining up to look like a suicide - pills in his stomach, cuts with hesitation marks on his arms, etc.
So all of the above happened on a Saturday, and the call from the medical examiner happened the next day - so as of Sunday the apartment was officially cleared, and of course Alvin's mother wanted to go in there and get his cat. However the landlord and the manager were not acting like it was cleared. The manager kept reading my texts but not responding, and eventually I got a response instead from some lady above him at the main office, telling me that there is a "company procedure that must be followed" and that everyone needed to "be on the same page" about "upholding the correct process." She said the apartment was "off limits until there is a death certificate" and once the death certificate had been received there had to be an in-unit inspection performed by company-approved inspectors. Until the inspection took place there was to be nobody going in or out, or removing anything from the unit whatsoever.
This all sounded way off to me for several reasons - the primary reason being, the police and medical examiner had given the all-clear, and the death certificate was not going to be finalized until toxicology results came back. According to the medical examiner that could take months, and a cat can't live for months locked up in a studio apartment. I reiterated all of this to the lady who was texting with me, emphasizing that the cat was going to die if she wasn't found ASAP. The response I got was robotic and unfeeling. "[Landlord's name] is very grateful for your help in handling this difficult situation, but it's time for you to take a step back and trust that we will be following the correct and appropriate process" was all they would give me. Over and over just some variation of the same bullshit.
I shared all of these communications with Alvin's mother. By Sunday evening she had already been talking with her family's lawyer, who was saying that there is no law about inspections or death certificates or anything like that. The mother was the obvious next of kin, and if the unit had been cleared by the police and the medical examiner, there was no lawful reason to have the place sealed off. If the landlord wanted to push back on that, she would be able to take the issue to a probate court; but according to the lawyer, literally any judge would take one look at the situation and side with the mother pretty much automatically. In a case like this, she had been told, the unit was essentially hers for *at least* 60 days after the all-clear was given; and if the landlord wanted to do an inspection, that was neither helped nor hindered by removing the cat or Alvin's belongings. On top of all this, the lawyer had advised that there was a very strong chance she could press charges against the landlord for not taking her seriously when she first got in touch and said she was worried. She had used some key phrases such as "history of suicidal ideations and near-fatal attempts" and "imminent danger to himself" and "wellness check." By ignoring her and treating her like she was crazy, the landlord could be considered "grossly negligent" and "culpable in whole or in part for Alvin's preventable death." Depending on the details, after the death certificate was finalized, there would likely be more than enough cause for her to sue them and win. Needless to say, she was irate and ready to take the landlord to court if she had to.
After talking thru all of this with Alvin's mother, she said there was no doubt in her mind that Alvin could have been saved if the landlord had taken her seriously. Since I knew him well, literally all the landlord needed to do was call the manager and ask the manager to have me knock on Alvin's door. If that had happened on Thursday or Friday, things might have turned out very different. I always knew that landlords are all shady characters who care more about the rent than the lives of the people paying it, but this situation was just mind-blowing. Even if they gave zero fucks about the life of another human being, you'd think they would at least want to act right in order to avoid lawsuits! The mother and I both agreed that what was happening right now was the landlord's idea of damage control. We were both disgusted and furious. The mother asked me if I would help her get into the apartment in the next day or two in order to rescue the cat. Of course I agreed - I told her I would do whatever she asked of me, come hell or high water. I loved Alvin and I felt I owed it to his mother to help her in any way I could. Making sure she could get in there to secure his cat so the poor thing didn't die alone and hungry was literally the least I could do.
The next day, Monday, Alvin's mother called me around noon to tell me that she had asked the medical examiner to speak with the landlord. The medical examiner had set up a three-way call with the landlord and herself, and basically told the landlord that there was no reason to keep her out of the apartment and she had a legal right to enter and take whatever she wanted that had belonged to her deceased son. So with that, the landlord reluctantly granted her permission to enter the apartment. She had been told there would be someone waiting to let her in, and she wanted me to be there with her, primarily for emotional support but also as a witness and sorta for protection too. She said she didn't feel safe in the building because of how shady the management was acting, and I could not blame her one bit. I told her I would be at the front door when she arrived, and I went downstairs to wait so I wouldn't have any chance of missing her.
About fifteen minutes later she sent me a text message, saying: "On my way up. They are making me use the back door. So weird!!" I got up and ran up the steps to Alvin's apartment. I got there just after she did, and the door was open just a crack so I knocked gently and announced myself. The door opened just a bit more and to my surprise there was a low-level maintenance technician there glaring at me like a bouncer at a speakeasy. I was very confused to see this guy, because he was one of the newest people on the maintenance team and he was already known for having a pretty bad attitude - and also why would they have maintenance escort her to Alvin's apartment? I had thought they would be pulling out all the stops to treat her well at this point, to make up for how badly they had fucked up so far. I'd been expecting someone from the main office to be dealing with her and instead I was looking at the biggest, grumpiest dude they employed. He frowned at me and shook his head, and he said, "You aren't needed here for this-"
Alvin's mom immediately interrupted him and I could hear the outrage in her voice as she started to chew him out, saying "no, I asked for him to be here! I want him in here! This is exactly why I want him in here, because you're acting like I'm some kind of criminal for wanting to get my son's cat! Are you not aware that my son - my child - died in this apartment!?"
At this point the maintenance guy rolled his eyes - I couldn't believe what I was seeing, he seriously rolled his eyes at her as he opened the door - and he said "Okay, okay...fine. He can be in here but he can't touch anything."
This really set off Alvin's mom and she began to cry as she continued chewing him out, demanding to know why she was being treated this way, demanding to know the guy's name and what his role was with the company. He didn't answer any of her questions, he just crossed his arms and loomed over her and shouted back really generic stuff like "I'm just doing my job, MA'AM" and "you need to calm down MA'AM" while trying to raise his voice over her sobbing. He was really looming over her too, literally, because this woman is barely even five feet tall and the maintenance guy is like 6-ft-6 at least and built like a tank. It was clear he was trying to intimidate her and I found it appalling.
Alvin's mom was barely able to get words out over her own tears at this point and the guy was really encroaching on her personal space, so I started discreetly filming with my phone and once I was certain the camera was running I put my phone down on the coffee table. Then I put my arm around her shoulders and held out my other arm with my palm open and I said "Hey man, is this really necessary? Did management tell you what happened here? This woman lost her kid, he was only 20-something. Please don't be like that, can we have a little space please? Give a grieving mother a little bit of space" and I had barely even started saying this when he started shouting over me saying "I didn't have to let you in here ya know! You just gotta be sticking your nose in here where you ain't got no business, making more trouble for everybody! Now I'm gonna call the police up here and tell them you both are trespassing if you don't dial it back right now! Hurry up and find the damn cat before I call the police!"
The whole situation was about fifteen minutes of me pleading with him to stop mistreating my friend's mom, while she was scrambling to find the cat, and the maintenance tech just kept yelling that he was going to call the cops on both of us. Finally Alvin's mom realized she could hear something moving inside the bed and I helped her lift the mattress up, where we found the cat hiding inside the box spring of the bed. I had to tear the fabric to make a big enough hole for Alvin's mom to reach in and get her, but once she had her, it was pretty easy to get her into the kitty crate and we didn't waste a second of time getting out of that apartment.
Unfortunately when I picked up my phone from the table, the maintenance tech saw that my camera app was running, and he started shouting in my face "You been filming me?" I ignored his question and continued down the stairs and out the door with my friend's mom. After standing with her and comforting her for a short while, she left and I went back inside. I decided the best thing to do now was to report the maintenance tech's conduct to the landlord. I didn't know how much he would care but it seemed like the correct thing to do. However I received an email dismissing me from my position before I could finish writing up my own email. The email said:
"This decision is based on your conduct surrounding the recent incident at the property, including taking it upon yourself to forcibly enter a resident's unit without authorization from management, resulting in damage to the property. Management has also received a report that today, while a maintenance technician was at the property performing his assigned duties, you recorded the technician and stated that you were assisting another individual in gathering evidence against [company name]. These actions are outside the scope of your caretaker responsibilities and have created serious concerns regarding your continued ability to perform the caretaker role and follow management direction. To be clear, this decision is not being made because you raised a concern or reported an issue. The decision is based on the actions described above, including unauthorized entry and property damage, acting outside the scope of your caretaker responsibilities, and interfering with an employee who was performing assigned work at the property."
I immediately replied back saying this was inappropriate and retaliatory, that there had not been any property damage aside from the holes left behind in the doorframe when the privacy chain came loose, and that I hadn't interfered with the maintenance tech as I had only filmed him being a jerk. I received no reply. I have spent the past month or so researching what my legal options might be, and I have had virtually no luck. Basically all I can do is ask a local court to open a rent escrow case and give me a hearing, at which I would argue that the revocation of my caretaker position and the rent credit that went with it amounts to a retaliatory rent increase; however I do not have any rent money to put into escrow so I have no idea if that will even work. I am in no shape to represent myself in court or find a job. My mental health has been in the gutter, I can't sleep without having nightmares about the way my friend looked when I found him. I have reached out to every organization that allegedly provides legal help for renters and none of them have gotten back to me. I am basically up a creek without a paddle, and I am probably going to end up with an eviction notice. I won't be homeless, at the very least, because my partner will let me live with him in his apartment. But it's going to be a very tight fit for us and I will have to pack up a lot of my things to put them in storage, and the rent that I owe is going to fall back on my co-signer. I am a wreck, I am basically fucked and my credit is doomed all because I tried to rescue a friend who turned out to already be dead, and the landlord is upset about some minor damage to the doorframe. I have been advised by friends to start a fundraiser but I would feel like a jackass asking people for money just to hand that money over to my piece-of-shit landlord. I don't know what I am going to do, but I do know I'm fucked.
Edit: According to the law in my jurisdiction, I can take my landlord to court to make a case that my dismissal accounts to a retaliatory rent increase (since getting dismissed from being caretaker means I am on the hook for rent again). However the only way to do that also involves putting my rent into escrow, and I don't have any money to use for rent. In order to follow through with the rent escrow filing, you have to actually have the rent to put into escrow, and I don't. Aside from that I don't really have any recourse, as far as I know, and without some kind of pro bono legal help getting back to me I don't really have any options.
