Around noon on September 3, Storm Burris, a mother of two, discovered that she had been evicted from the Renewal Heights Apartments, previously the Canfield Green Apartments, in Ferguson. She had left that morning to send her children to school and returned to see her fully furnished home empty.
Some of her possessions were stolen, destroyed, or tossed in a dumpster.
“They were laughing. … ‘This is crazy,'” Burris recalled the maintenance supervisor saying to her when she returned home. “They were pointing to the trash can. When I took a good look at it, it was all my babies’ stuff in it, and I was in shock.”
RELATED STORIES
Burris discovered that, despite being a paying tenant in the flat, she had been kicked out with just September’s lease payment remaining.
She said, “I do everything I am supposed to do, and this just really set me back a lot. I believe this story needs to be heard because it shows how easily families can lose everything through no fault of their own, and how little accountability exists when a landlord or eviction team makes such a catastrophic mistake. I am asking for accountability, community support, and a chance to rebuild my life for my children.”
READ ALSO: Georgia couple evicted from their home after alleged fraudster claimed ownership
According to a Ferguson Police Department incident report, the property management had maintenance clean out the wrong unit; the statement description classified the crime as a “burglary.”
“It felt bad,” she said. “I couldn’t even feel how I wanted to feel because I just had to think about what I am going to do? I felt like I had to get in survival mode.”
5 On Your Side examined a video of a police officer accompanying Burris to the leasing agency. According to the footage, a leasing office staffer stated that they never handed maintenance a key to her unit.
A woman in the leasing office is heard acknowledging that an occupied unit was cleaned out and not the intended unit.
Burris stated that the leasing staff attempted to apologize after realizing their error.
“‘That wasn’t meant for you. You’re a good-paying client,” she claimed the leasing manager told her. “They wanted to do stuff to make it right, but there wasn’t much they could do.”
Burris said she turned down a $5,000 offer and a month’s rent free from Renewal Heights Apartments. She never found some of the items, including clothing. According to her, the apartment’s promise to make amends was unsatisfactory.
“My son’s bedroom set, two new generation iPads, my son and daughter had cars they could drive when they could charge them up, Pandora jewelry, Kay jewelry, a safe, and I had an engagement ring that was $2,000 alone.”
READ ALSO: Minneapolis man who threatened to call cops on black co-tenants for using gym evicted
The outraged mother had some belongings in totes since she was packing to move once her lease expired, but she said the eviction crew removed everything out of the totes and threw them in the garbage can so they could use the totes to carry the items she claimed they wanted to keep.
After being led by the police to several of the eviction team’s apartment units within the complex, Burris claimed to have recovered some of her personal belongings.
Then, Burris said that the eviction crew removed her personal belongings from the dumpster and returned them to her apartment, even though she had refused their request to reenter her residence.
“TVs broke, it was stained, it stinks,” she said. “I said no, and they still did it.”
After having the things from the dumpster returned to her apartment, Burris, who had been planning to sleep on the floor with her kids, made the choice to vacate the flat entirely, as advised by her attorney, she said.
She has been lodging with family and friends along with her kids.
READ ALSO: Tense video shows police saving man from burning home by dragging him out by his ankles
