Landlord demands dead victim’s late rent, fees

[nitroglycol]

When she opened the letter from her dead son’s former landlord this week, Danelle Eckert thought there had to be some mistake. The letter, addressed to Eckert and to the estate of her son, Colin Byars, was demanding March and April rent, late fees and an “early termination fee” because he had left his apartment before the end of his lease. Byars, a 24-year-old teacher, was killed Feb. 21 when he was punched in the head on a Kenosha street.
“I thought they must not understand that Colin was killed. But no, they understood completely,” Eckert said.
She said the apartment’s property manager told her that they knew Byars had been killed. But the woman told Eckert the management company had been advised by their legal representative that they should go after the rent and fees.

Source. I'd say this is unbelievable, but that wouldn't be accurate, since we've already seen similar stories. Sad and infuriating, though. Some people have no shame.

[art]

Re: Landlord demands dead victim’s late rent, fees

Maybe I'm cold and heartless, but why shouldn't the deceased's estate not have to pay the debts that the deceased incurred while alive?

If he left nothing behind, then I can see the point, but if there was something to "inherit", then why shouldn't the debts be paid?

I don't believe there is any law that says there is a "death jubilee" - if there were, wouldn't we all rack up as much debt as we could as we get older? (Oh yeah, that *does* seem to be the plan in the US :-)

Now any debts incurred post-mortem should probably be absolved due to contract termination via "act of god/fsm/nature"

[Sharky]

Re: Landlord demands dead victim’s late rent, fees

Source. I'd say this is unbelievable, but that wouldn't be accurate, since we've already seen similar stories. Sad and infuriating, though. Some people have no shame.

Why is it sad and infuriating for someone to want to be paid for services rendered? Does wanting to be paid make him heartless? Isn't it possible to be sympathetic about the guy's death, while also making a claim against his estate?

[Andy]

Re: Landlord demands dead victim’s late rent, fees

Man, that's just sick. And wanting an early termination fee and late fees too... Apparently, a couple g's is more important than a woman who just lost her son.

[Sapiens]

Re: Landlord demands dead victim’s late rent, fees

Man, that's just sick. And wanting an early termination fee and late fees too... Apparently, a couple g's is more important than a woman who just lost her son.

LOL, it is an Usury based system.

In order to be let in on the Usury secret you had to sacrifice your child to Molech. If you were willing to sacrifice you child to Molech, what makes you think they would be compassionate to others? :rolleyes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molech

[Sapiens]

Re: Landlord demands dead victim’s late rent, fees

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publ...cle_4634.shtml

Poor debtors go to jail and are billed for the privilege
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor


Apr 27, 2009, 00:20

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A doctor in the Midwest wrote to me again this past Friday about how the economic mess is destroying people.

He wrote, “One of my patients is a . . . 40ish CPA and she was in for an eye problem yesterday . . . She was distraught over the state of the economy and its effect on her clients. She has had many this year who have lost their homes to foreclosure. To her -- and her clients’ -- dismay, the bank or lending institution is issuing 1099 forms for re-po’d property to the victims. Apparently, since the hapless former homeowners are effectively ‘forgiven’ the remaining amounts on their loans, that is imputed as earned income and they are turned into the IRS for large tax liabilities!!! How’s that for justice? She said that she had actually had people speak seriously about killing themselves!”

“What a screwed up country . . . Yesterday, I finally bit the bullet and cashed in part of my IRA (already down near 50%) to pay off office credit cards (we have depended on these credit lines for office expenses for some time) because they all raised their rates to 30%!!! Of course, O[bama] has nothing to say about usury . . .

“On top of this, I ran across this today . . .” What followed was an article by Eric Ruder, Guilty of Being Poor from dissidentvoice.org. I will highlight some of its points but this is a must-read. It picks up the theme that the good doctor and his patient experienced firsthand, that of debtor’s prison, or jail time for nonpayment of debt.

As Ruder points out, “19th century jailers, even pre-Civil war, largely abandoned this odious practice of putting people in jail for falling into debt . . . In fact, in the 1970s and 80s, the US Supreme Court affirmed that incarcerating people who can’t pay fines because of poverty violates the US Constitution.” As he states, “some states and county jails never got the memo. Welcome to the debtor’s prisons of the 21st century.” He then detailed a number of real-life, often tragic cases.

The first was a poor Michigan resident who was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year old son. This was the subject of a New York Times editorial, as well. I wonder if Ponzi swindler Bernie Madoff will be billed for his coming stay in prison, or Tyco International’s CEO Dennis Koslowski or Enron’s former CEO Jeff Skilling pay for their stays in prison.

In regard to the hapless Michigan resident, Edwina Nowlin, the Times wrote, “When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent because they cannot make various court-ordered payments. That is both barbaric and unconstitutional.”

Ruder wrote Nowlin’s case was more serious than the Times imagined. “Not only was Nowlin under orders to pay a fine stemming from someone else’s actions, but she had been laid off from work and lost her home at the time she was ordered to ‘reimburse’ the county for her son’s detention.” And even though she couldn’t pay, the court held her in contempt and laid a 30-day sentence on her.

Three days after she was jailed, she was let out for a day to work. She picked up a paycheck of $178.53, which she assumed could be put towards paying off the $104 to gain release from jail. But no, when she returned to the jail, “the sheriff told her to sign her paycheck over to the country—to pay $120 for her own room and board plus $22 for a drug test and booking fee.”

Nowlin asked for but was denied a court-appointed lawyer for her defense. “So, because she was too poor to pay for a lawyer and denied her constitutional right to a court-provided lawyer, she couldn’t fight the contempt charge that resulted from her poverty.” This as the fines and fees she was supposed to pay now multiplied like a credit card balance.

The director of the Michigan ACLU said, “Jailing her because of her poverty is not only unconstitutional. It’s unconscionable and a shameful waste of resources. It is not a crime to be poor in this country, and the government must stop resurrecting debtor’s prisons from the dustbin of history.”

Nor is Michigan the only state where you can be jailed for involuntary poverty. This nefarious process is going on every day in courtrooms around the USA. Read Ruder’s story for these hair-raising examples.

They take place in a number of southern states, including Georgia and Louisiana, and bear the unmistakable stamp of racism, as well as state-sponsored usury, a kind of terrorism all its own. It includes debtors being turned over to for-profit collection companies until they pay off their fines. So, while on prison probation, they have to come up with substantial monthly “supervision fees” that can double or triple the amount that a well-situated person would have to pay for the same offense.

Thus, this poverty profiling of debtors only serves to dig its victims deeper into debt with the possibility of longer and longer jail time, for which, in turn, there will be new charges.

That’s almost as vicious as Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and as criminal, given the defendant’s inability to obtain legal counsel.

Eric Ruder’s writes, “We need to build a movement, like the working-class struggles of the 1930s, that can demand an end to the inhuman practice of incarcerating people for no other crime than finding themselves at the bottom of the social ladder.”
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net. His new book, “State Of Shock: Poems from 9/11 on” is available at www.jerrymazza.com, Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com.

[Scot]

Re: Landlord demands dead victim’s late rent, fees

Man, that's just sick. And wanting an early termination fee and late fees too... Apparently, a couple g's is more important than a woman who just lost her son.

I might ask why it is the mother thinks she's entitled to her son's assets.

Seems to me it's the mother that's seeing her son's death as an opportunity to profit.

The son made a deal with the landlord and it's the landlord is out the money unless he gets it from the estate.

The son didn't owe the mother anything yet the mother wants his estate.

She should spend more time mourning the loss of her son than the loss of his assets.

His assets aren't some sort of consolation prize.

[Digidiver]

Re: Landlord demands dead victim’s late rent, fees

I would suppose she mourns greatly and feels her families grief trespassed upon by an opportunistic parasite. To confront a mother with that issue so close to the time of losing her child is an affront to human decency. It would have been more humane to of at least waited or have a dialogue about what would be a fair arrangement to settle.
From the article::
Eckert said she was not upset about the money.
It’s the morals of the whole thing, she said. “I just wanted the community to know how ruthless and heartless these people were.”
“

[Guest]

Re: Landlord demands dead victim’s late rent, fees

Scot - in this instance I think you are carrying your free market principles (which I've noted in so many of your posts otherwise without negative comment) to a truly absurd extreme. When a person dies, their residency contracts and obligations are nullified, period. If you want to take up the cause for the opposite argument, I think you'd find a majority of people in the world found your arguments to be quite notably exasperated, and distracted by free market ideology too, because most people instinctively understand that in this instance, humanistic clauses intruding upon more mundane contractual conventions is considered the wiser and more civilized of the alternatives. Nobody plans to die in order to defraud a landlord of future rent on a premises they can no longer occupy anyway. To fixate upon the inconvenience to the landlord here is almost comical when weighed against the inconvenience to the departed tenant.

I might ask why it is the mother thinks she's entitled to her son's assets.

Seems to me it's the mother that's seeing her son's death as an opportunity to profit.

The son made a deal with the landlord and it's the landlord is out the money unless he gets it from the estate.

The son didn't owe the mother anything yet the mother wants his estate.

She should spend more time mourning the loss of her son than the loss of his assets.

His assets aren't some sort of consolation prize.

[Guest]

Re: Landlord demands dead victim’s late rent, fees

duplicate post