• Update
• National News
• World News

Brian Humphries filled a quart-size Ziploc bag with crawling bed bugs from his Denver apartment and told his landlord about it.

What he’s trying to figure out is what took his landlord almost two weeks to spray the apartment at 25 Grant St. after he brought the infestation to light. He’s also trying to figure out why the bugs never went away.

Jackie Howe wants to know why five months later she moved into an apartment in the building and was never told of the environmental hazard. She wants to know why landlord Tamera Vander Vliet never disclosed that Denver Environmental Health had validated bed bug complaints at the building on three separate occasions prior to her moving in.

After Howe recently raised another complaint to Environmental Health, a fourth inspection of the building once again validated complaints of bed bugs in several apartments and the department yet again ordered management to spray, according to Meghan Hughes, spokeswoman for Environmental Health. The building is operated by Denver-based Shockcor, Inc., which maintains dozens of properties throughout the Denver Metro region.

Vliet said, “I’m not surprised” to hear from a newspaper reporter when the Denver Daily News called to investigate, acknowledging that tenants had been complaining of the infestation. But she quickly declined to comment and hung up the phone.

Moving out

Meanwhile, Humphries couldn’t wait to move out of the apartment he shared with his 7-year-old daughter and girlfriend. They moved out at the end of last month after a five-month battle with bed bugs. He found the pests crawling in the dark spaces of his mattresses, couch and underneath carpets.

The more he vacuumed up dead bed bug carcasses, the more he would find creeping around the apartment, in the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room and, of course, the bedroom.

“I started getting bites that would turn into welts for me,” he said. “They’d itch like crazy for weeks. It’s really a bad situation. I’m a guy, so I didn’t want to make much of it in front of the girls, but it really itched and hurt when you’d scratch.”

Nuisance

More than anything else, Humphries spoke of the nuisance of having to deal with the bugs and the subsequent spraying. All furniture and appliances had to be pulled away from the walls, linens and clothes had to be put in trash bags, or thrown away, and the apartment had to be completely cleaned afterwards.

Humphries said the first time he showed the Ziploc bag to Vliet she didn’t order a spraying. It wasn’t until the second time that she ordered his apartment to be sprayed.

Pest control experts say the entire building would have had to be sprayed to get rid of the infestation, not just one apartment. They say the infestation should have been disclosed to tenants because of the difficulty of completely getting rid of the pests.

“It’s like buying a car that’s been wrecked, it needs to be disclosed,” said Humphries, who himself had been in the property management business with 13 properties.

Denial

The owner of the building and Shockcor, Inc., denied the infestation, arguing that the report was given to the Denver Daily News second-hand. Tom Shockcor said he never received any formal reports from Environmental Health and added that until he received the reports he would not spray the building because he hadn’t identified a “specific problem.” 

“I never received one bit of data from the City and County of Denver,” he said. “I know how they operate. They need to send a notification via certified mail. I haven’t received one notification.”

Shockcor believes the tenants are making up facts. He does not believe that Humphries filled a Ziploc bag with bed bugs.

“You’re taking someone’s word for what’s been happening, or what’s not happening, without any evidence,” said Shockcor. 

“You’re being lied to by the residents and you’re absorbing that in,” he added.

Humphries said he waited out the bed bugs without breaking his lease because he didn’t want to be delinquent and still wants to get his security deposit back.

Shockcor, however, said he can’t take Humphries’ word as truth. 

‘C properties’

He said he purchases “C properties” that come with problems.

“We are a fee property management company. We inherit problems,” he said. 

Howe said she tried for days just to get Vliet to call her back about the infestation. A bit scared of bugs, Howe said she wanted the apartment to be sprayed immediately, but didn’t receive a call back after several phone calls and e-mails. She tried the after hours 24-hour emergency number, but a representative told her that Vliet said to say the situation was not an emergency and she would get to it later in the week.

According to e-mail exchanges between Howe and Vliet obtained by the Denver Daily News, Vliet said she didn’t return the phone calls because she doesn’t work weekends.

“I do not work weekends; therefore; [I] did not return your calls, being out of town, and [I] did receive [an] emergency call but was unable to treat this as an emergency issue,” read one e-mail dated June 2nd. “Our preferred vendor is not open on weekends. I have not heard from you once in regards to needing exterminating of any kind for spiders and/or roaches and/or bed bugs. I do not have any verbal agreements with you.”

Earlier e-mails to Vliet about the infestation problem date back to May.

Evidence?

An e-mail from Vliet dated June 3rd states: “If you have seen any pest and/or have any bites, please provide evidence of such … there were no signs of any pests.”

Howe eventually called a pest control company on her own because she couldn’t wait any longer. She started moving out of her apartment on Saturday, breaking the terms of her lease. She is not looking forward to the legal battle she is likely to face for having been forced to move out early.

“There are people in this building who are elderly … infants in this building, kids in this building,” said Howe. “This needs to be brought up to the public to let them know that if people want to rent from this building, this is what’s going to happen.”

Tips to deal with bed bugs:

• Move bed away from wall

• Be careful buying used furniture and mattresses

• Use a plastic mattress cover

• Don’t use communal furniture or laundry bags

Add a new comment... Spammers: links do not work and our site gets monitored for spam daily and your comments will be removed -- please do not spam our site!

Your Name:

Your Email:

Title:

Comments:

Please copy the characters from this image into the box below. All characters are either numbers 1-9 (not zero) or letters (upper and lowercase). If you cannot read this image, you can click it to try a different image (most browsers). Otherwise, submit the page anyway and try again.

Image Text: