SAN ANTONIO – A San Antonio senior loves her apartment, but says a squatter living upstairs now has her thinking about moving.<\/p>\n
She reached out to FOX SA’s Problem Solver Darian Trotter, after she says property managers were not taking her complaints seriously.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been living in hell,” said Cynthia Monroe. “Living in hell.”<\/p>\n
For the past six years, Cynthia Monroe has lived at Midcrown Senior Pavillion and her experience has been bitter-sweet…<\/p>\n
Sweet, because she loves where she lives and her neighbors.<\/p>\n
“I loved the people, you know, they was like, we just connected,” said Monroe. <\/p>\n
But bitter, because she does not like the squatter living in the apartment above her.<\/p>\n
Investigative Reporter Darian Trotter asked, “Does he have a lease? No,” Monroe replied. <\/p>\n
Trotter asked, “So he’s up there illegally and getting on your nerves? Exactly,” said Monroe. <\/p>\n
Trotter asked, “How so?” Monroe replied, “Oh, he thump it, make all kind of noise, have other people in the partner with him and doing all kind of crazy stuff.”<\/p>\n
Here’s how it all started. An elderly neighbor moved in upstairs, and apparently allowed her adult grandson to join her.<\/p>\n
A noise-maker, who Cynthia says kept up racket all hours of the day and late night.<\/p>\n
“He’s old enough to know better, and I just couldn’t I was calling police, calling the office, letting them know what was going on up there,” Monroe said. “And seemed like nothing would ever get done, nothing.”<\/p>\n
In addition to disturbance complaints, she says a number of other issues led her neighbor to move out of the complex for renters 55 and older.<\/p>\n
“They was gonna put her, they put her out,” Monroe said. “So she had to move, but he came back and he’s been up there ever since.”<\/p>\n
Cynthia says the squatter entertains loud groups of people and there’s a disturbing odor.<\/p>\n
Trotter asked, “What does it smell like? It smells like marijuana,” said Monroe. <\/p>\n
Lots of it. Cynthia says the strong smell of marijuana travels through the vents nearly chocking her out.<\/p>\n
“It’s all on my clothes, all on this here,” Monroe said. “It’s sad.”<\/p>\n
Trotter asked, “How does that affect your breathing? I can’t breathe,” Monroe replied. “I can’t breathe, I have to wear a mask. I shouldn’t have to do this in my home.”<\/p>\n
Trotter asked, “So how long has this been going on? Oh, my god, about, oh, maybe eight, nine months now,” Monroe replied. <\/p>\n
Cynthia made clear she wasn’t wearing a mask because of our visit. Rather, to help filter an odor that was noticeable even to us.<\/p>\n
An odor that’s making her COPD and congestive heart failure worse.<\/p>\n
“I sleep with a CPAP machine on, and I have CHF, and I can’t do it,” said Monroe. <\/p>\n
Trotter asked, “What does the apartment management say? Mrs. Monroe, we don’t see we go, when we go up there, we don’t see nobody,” Monroe replied. <\/p>\n
Cynthia says the squatter has been hard to catch, because he shows up after the front office closes.<\/p>\n
Trotter asked, “When you call police, what the police say?” Monroe replied, “They say they’ll go up there and knock on the door and they’ll call me and say, well…we went up there and when nobody answered the door. He’s not going to answer the door.”<\/p>\n
We checked, police would only be able to force entry if a serious crime was being committed.<\/p>\n
“I’m stuck. I feel like I’m stuck,” said Monroe. “And don’t me wrong, I love my apartment like I told them. I love my apartment but I just can’t do this. Go up there and do what you’re supposed to do, clean it out, clear it out, get it ready for somebody else to move in.”<\/p>\n
We called the property manager, Opportunity Home, about her complaint.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re told staffers went out twice during a 5-month period and found no signs of activity or odor of illegal substances.<\/p>\n
And both times, staffers reported changing the locks.<\/p>\n
Cynthia says the problems kept happening after those visits, but only after we got involved, did they stop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN ANTONIO – A San Antonio senior loves her apartment, but says a squatter living upstairs now has…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":66154,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5133],"tags":[5229,9097,26528,46869,3628,3344,22877,7207,7202,7203,46868,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-66437","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-apartment","10":"tag-complaints","11":"tag-cynthia-monroe","12":"tag-management","13":"tag-marijuana","14":"tag-noise","15":"tag-police","16":"tag-san-antonio","17":"tag-sanantonio","18":"tag-squatter","19":"tag-texas","20":"tag-tx","21":"tag-united-states","22":"tag-united-states-of-america","23":"tag-unitedstates","24":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","25":"tag-us","26":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114854976698493464","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}