Police report -
I spoke to our insurance company and they said in order to file a claim we have to file a police report. They made it out like it would be easy, because they thought we were dealing with a normal police department. Little did they know....
The police department was very uncooperative in obtaining a police report. I had to call about 5 times on several different days before they agreed that stealing and damaging property isn't a "civil matter" as they had said so many times before.
What made them change their mind? Their main argument was that if someone can get in the house with a key, even if they aren't authorized, they are not actually stealing from inside the home. This quickly changed when I gave examples of walking into a police station and taking shotguns and computer equipment, since the precinct is unlocked during standard hours.
We got the police report finally, and of course that was the last we heard from the police. Thank you city of Bedford police department for re-affirming my opinion of your value to the tax paying community.
State Farm -
The report was sent to State Farm along with a list of items and values of property destroyed or stolen by our landlord from hell. They were shocked to hear the details and decided they were going to sue the landlord, and go ahead with processing our claim on our items. This was amazing news to us as we finally had someone who cared and wanted to do something to help us out.
There were some hurdles to getting it all paid for, because of how they process theft claim money. It's a long story, but basically you receive 50% of the value of the items up front, then as you replace them you send in receipts to get the other 50%. I assume its an anti-scam measure for fraudulent claims.
Deposit -
The landlord sent us a $54 check and nothing else from our deposit, two months after we moved out. She cited several hundred dollars of "lost showings" where she charged us over $100 each time she wasn't able to show the house. Further she charged for cleaning, and "tree trimming" at $120.
Knowing who we were dealing with, I took an abundance of pictures of the house when we left. I did some digging and can't find those pictures at the time of this writing. I'll see if I can find them at a later date.
At any rate, lets just say it was very clean. I steam cleaned, and we paid for a house cleaner to come in and really make it shine, and made sure everything was perfect.
But because she was so cash strapped and a poor financial planner, the landlord felt compelled to make up a story to retain $950 of the $1000 deposit.
I spoke to an attorney as part of a free consultation and two important items came out from the discussions. One, if the judge ruled in our favor we could hope for a judgement. This is painfully difficult to collect on in this case, as we would have to file a lien on the property. Because its a rent house, we would not get any money until she sold the house. There were some other options, but each one costs money in the form of time off of work spent in a courtroom and money for forms, filing fees and more.
The scarier part was that if you sued this lady, I would have to give my new address in the court records. Because of how close we are to my old house and the fact that they had already broke in once, I was not sure that the money I might never get was worth the worry about what the landlord would do. More specifically, her son was the one that destroyed our house before, what's to stop him from coming a few blocks and paying another house visit?
I decided it wasn't worth it. State Farm had more than paid for replacing all the items that were broken, with brand new items, and we had moved into a much better place with an amazing landlord.
We still stay in touch with our neighbor from the old house. So far there have been three tennants move into the house, with one of them going on a rent strike because the landlord would not fix certain items (this sounds familiar).
We have lived in our new home the entire time. We have had some things break and the landlord fixed them the same day, or the next day at the latest. We have a much bigger and nicer home, for less than we paid at the other home.
In short, all the pain, stress, and emotional drain that we went through ended up having a happy ending, at least for us. We replaced all our items, and everything has been wonderful.
So happy in fact that I forgot to write the ending to this story until almost four years later.
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