"Justice is Not Found in a Courtroom"

When you think about eviction, you think about buck-toothed yokels or uneducated ghetto dwellers, or perhaps clowns pouring, distressed and unkempt, out of a small car. Here's a funny story about our eviction from our apartment. Names have been kept the same to expose both the innocent and not-so-innocent.

My fiancee, one-year-old son and I live in a two-bedroom apartment in Claymont, Delaware, at a complex named East Pointe Apartments. A month after we moved into the apartment, in June, we began having problems with water leakage. The entire floor from the outer wall to a couple feet out from that wall in the baby's room became a small lake every time it rained. We tried to be positive about it:

"Look honey, the nest of spiders living in the baby's closet drowned."

"And he looks so cute in his new galoshes!"

Over the next month, our bedroom also began to suffer; stains began to appear in the section of wall that represented the corner of the building, and those stains then bubbled out as the dry wall began to rot and grow mold. We beseeched the complex to fix the problem, because we feared for the health of our young son; we have family who has experienced problems with their health because of mold. They tore out the damaged wall, even dug up the earth around our foundation and put tar on as a sealant, but didn't fully repair the wall they'd torn out, and refused to respond to our complaints that damage was appearing in other locations.

As days, weeks, and ultimately months went by, nothing happened. We resorted to sleeping in the living room, for fear of tiny beasties floating around in the air of the bedroom, breeding and creating ecosystems, complex democracies, and - we imagine - their own little despotic slumlords. Finally, we were forced to take the law into our own hands. This is not to say that we donned our crime-fighting outfits (of which you know nothing about, if you value your life); we called Code Enforcement.

A nice man named Victor Morgan appeared at our door several days later, on one October morning, and strolled through our house to observe our complaints. We apologized profusely for the mess (we are not organized people at the best of times, and make no excuses, but without the use of half of our apartment we were at unrivaled levels of sloppiness), which he waved off in a friendly manner, and even played with our son a little bit. To us, in our depressed and anxious, defeated state, Victor was our first bastion of hope.

He looked at the place and he tsked several times to himself, and when he left he had a laundry list of citations against the complex, and his promise that he would testify on our behalf in court.

This was when I made my first big mistake: I wrote a letter to the complex, requesting that the citations be immediately remedied, and threatening legal action if there was no response in a timely manner. I probably shouldn't have included that leather glove with the letter, either. And the kiss of death upon hand delivery may also have been overboard.

Their immediate response was harsh. The so-called acting community manager, a woman named Sandy Masters, came to the apartment and walked through partway, then told us that our mess was unacceptable and refused to even look at the rest of the place - let alone the master bedroom and the torn out wall.

What followed over the next month was a number of letters. First, that we were being evicted because of the messiness in the apartment. Second, that we were being evicted because they didn't have suitable accommodations to relocate us to. Finally, the claim was filed due to non-payment of rent; that's right, they claimed that we hadn't paid our rent one month, and were evicting us for it. I like to imagine that Sandy Masters was sitting in an office walled with windows at the top of a tower made entirely of obsidian as she did this, and cackling as she strangled a puppy for each letter she signed. Again, this is largely the product of my imagination.

Several months went by where nothing happened, and we made our second mistake: we didn't order our bank statements, or copies of the fronts and backs of our checks. When the court date rolled around last week, we didn't have the information we needed to prove that we were current on our rent; we had every impression we were being evicted for the reasons in the letters we had received. Who could evict us for messiness and not having another place to put us, and after our complaint to boot? We were confident. We had a pro bono lawyer, Jane Evans, who was confident as well. There would be no losing this case, and our counter-suit would put our kid through college.

It was not until we held a pow wow with our lawyer outside the courtroom, and reviewed the statements my fiancee printed from her online banking webpage, that we discovered our third, and biggest mistake: every rent check we'd written since the eviction notice was sent was written out to the wrong complex, cashed by our complex, and then denied in their accounting ledgers. Did we have the backs of the checks to prove it with their stamps? No.

The case was disastrous. Sandy Masters sat at the witness stand and told every lie that her high-paid lawyer prompted her to tell, while we told nothing but the truth that destroyed us, and even our own lawyer was sighing and shaking her head by the end. The ruling by the judge was in the favor of the apartment complex, and the only comfort Jane Evans offered my fiancee as she cried in the empty courtroom afterwards was this frighteningly true statement: "justice is not found in a courtroom."