At Lease-t She’s Gone

I worked for an apartment complex with 72 units. 

One resident was a couple of months behind in rent when the assistant manager called her. She said she had moved out three months prior and she wasn’t paying — she still had six months on her lease. The manager was being nice and told her she needed to give her 30 days’ notice and turn in the keys. If she didn’t at least turn in keys by the end of the month we’d add another month to her bill.

Well, a few weeks came and went and we still had no keys. We got a call from one of her neighbors about water on their kitchen floor. There were inches of water on their floor… and the dining room and living room, and out into the common hall. Four units were flooded.

We found the leak in the unit of the woman who’d moved out. We had to shut the water down to half the complex for two days and it took two more weeks to fix the water damages.

When our lawyers finally met the woman in court, she said she wasn’t going to pay for all the water damage. The lawyer argued that if she still occupied the unit she would have reported the water leak when it was just a trickle before the pipe ruptured. The judge agreed.