Tenants Represented by Legal Aid Society of Cleveland Win Judgments Against Abusive Landlord Pair
Legal Services E-lert
Bibliographic Info:
Author: Mark Gillispie
Source: Plain Dealer, “Tenants, attorneys accuse Cleveland property owners of cruel treatment"
Date: July 13, 2011
The Plain Dealer writes: “By some accounts, brothers Graig and Derek Brown are exceptionally bad landlords. Court documents and interviews portray the brothers as vindictive and mean-spirited with a track record of illegally shutting off utilities and locking out tenants for being a few days late with the rent or for complaining about conditions in their rental units. Cleveland Housing Court Judge Raymond Pianka made his feelings clear when he recently awarded $482,000 in compensatory and punitive damages to Cindy Smith, a former tenant of the Browns. . . . Cindy Smith accused the Browns of forcing her and her two young children to move into a homeless shelter last year after the brothers shut off her utilities and locked her out of the bottom half of a West 120th Street double. She said the Browns retaliated after she asked for another week to pay her rent. She said there were extenuating circumstances: She had had a miscarriage a week earlier and was strapped for cash after paying funeral expenses. . . . The final straw came when Smith returned home July 9and found that the locks had been changed, forcing her and her children to move into a homeless shelter. She was able to squeeze through a window to grab some clothing, but the family never recovered the rest of their meager belongings. ‘They shouldn't be allowed to do people wrong like that,’ Smith said in an interview. ‘I really despise them for what they did to me and my children. We didn't have to go through that. They just started doing evil stuff.’. . . Smith said she laughed when her attorney, Scott Kuboff, told her about the $482,000 judgment. Kuboff took the case for free as a volunteer attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland. ‘It does not look very hopeful that we will be able to collect,’ Kuboff said in an interview.”