BALTIMORE (CN) — From kitchen appliances to the ashes of his tenant’s great-grandfather, a Baltimore landlord got it all with the help of the sheriff’s office.
Their heirlooms may be irreplaceable, but Tiffany Gattis and Marshall Todman are fighting in court now for relief, telling a federal judge that Baltimore City’s eviction law unconstitutionally strips tenants of their property without prior notice.
Alleging conversion and violation of Maryland consumer-protection law, Gattis and Todman take issue principally with a 12-year-old ordinance on chattels that they has no match in any other jurisdiction in the state. The Baltimore law requires landlords evicting tenants who are behind on their rent to give two weeks’ notice before locking them out, at which time he can take their household goods as “abandoned property.” But Gattis and Todman were paying rent under a verbal lease, which the landlord simply declared an end to. As “tenants holding over,” the law requires no notice to them.
“The way Baltimore City handles these cases is simply unjust,” Joseph Mack, an attorney for the couple, said in an interview. “An eviction is already a horrible event for someone who is losing their home. To further marginalize tenants by allowing all their personal belongings to be taken without warning is inhumane.”
In Gattis and Todman’s case, they say they lost “all of their worldly possessions.” They say they were packed and ready to move out on Aug. 1. On July 31, they went to work as usual, Todman at Jiffy Lube and Gattis at a bank where she works as a fraud analyst. Soon thereafter, Gattis got a call from her mother that their landlord had arrived with a sheriff’s deputy in tow.
She got home to find the locks changed and Todman’s motorcycle, a Yamaha R6 that he’d bought himself as an early birthday present, chained to a tree. It had allegedly been pushed into the yard from the street to be deemed abandoned “in or about” the property. All the boxes the couple had neatly packed were gone.
Frantically, they dialed their landlord, Brock Collins
“You owe me money,” Todman says Collins told him. At first, he would not say how much. By nightfall he texted the figure: $5,600.
The couple couldn’t pay.
Baltimore City’s top lawyer says the city isn’t to blame.
“My view from the complaint is that city law aside, if the allegations are true, then the landlord seems to me to have simply ‘stolen’ the tenant’s belongings,” City Solicitor Andre Davis said in an email. “The city law’s tangential connection to the ‘theft’ is not likely to persuade a court that it was the law, rather than the plainly extortionate behavior of the landlord, that caused the tenant’s loss.”
