New Haven Independent

That was the scene Tuesday at the corner of Lombard Street and Blatchley Avenue.

The inspectors from New Haven government’s Livable City Initiative (LCI) were following up a day after police found dead birds and fish in the blood-dribbled bed of a second-floor tenant who was in a rent dispute with the landlord. (Click on the play arrow to watch two other tenants describe their own fowl discoveries.)

LCI’s Rick Mazzada and Rafael Ramos (left to right in photo) decided to pay a visit to see what else they could find at the house at 492 Lombard.

They didn’t find any more dead poultry. They did, as they suspected, find other problems. Now LCI is now after the landlord to fix those problems.

Where The Trail Started

Mazzada, a housing inspector, visited the house two weeks ago. He was acting on a tip about a drug-abusing prostitute squatting in the basement. He found a woman there and sent her on her way. He removed a door to what he said was an illegal basement apartment.

Mazzada gave his number to the on-site superintendent, DeShanin Coleman, who lives on the third floor with his family.

Fast forward to this Monday morning. Kevin Velez is waking up after a night bartending gig.

Velez rents one of three bedrooms in the second floor apartment; the three tenants share the kitchen and bathroom on the second floor.

Velez walked into the kitchen — and came upon a mysterious trail of what would turn out to be chicken meal. Then he took a whiff. “The smell was atrocious,” he recalled. “I thought it was the garbage at first,” someone not taking it out.

Then he followed the scent to one of the bedrooms, whose occupant was already out of the house and at work. The meal trail led to the bed, and to the birds and fish.

Upstairs, Coleman and his wife also smelled a sickening odor. They thought it was something in their apartment; they started cleaning.

Then Coleman (pictured) noticed the trail of meal in the hall leading into the second-floor apartment. He followed it into the bedroom. “I saw three big roosters, whatever they are, in the bed dead,” he recalled. “I didn’t know about the fish until the tenant’s sister came. She looked under the bed and said, ‘There’s fish under here too!’”

He grabbed his camera to preserve the sight for posterity, or at least for another day.

Coleman also called the landlord, repeatedly.

“We think the landlord did it. Him and the tenant having problems,” Coleman said. “When I called him yesterday, he was like, ‘Let me call you back. I’m driving.

“I was calling him all day. He was like, ‘I’m not coming up there.’”

Next Coleman called the number he had for Inspector Mazzada at LCI. “This is a police matter,” Mazzada told him. So Coleman called the cops.

The cops arrived. But they didn’t make any arrests, according to police spokesman Officer Joe Avery.

Meanwhile, he cleaned up the apartment. He wasn’t going to take out the animal carcasses — he wanted the landlord to come take care of that — but his cousin went ahead and did it anyway.

As soon as Mazzada and Ramos arrived at the house Tuesday, they found a two-by-four placed under the back porch to hold it up. Ramos said that’s a code violation.

Inside the house, they found the empty apartment in the basement, which Ramos said could be an illegal set-up. He found an unsafe exit from the basement.

He also discovered that the landlord, Saloman Smarck, has never registered with the city and paid a licensing fee as required by law.

The tenant whose bed was poultry-ized was out of the house. From the looks of the room, he was in the process of packing up to move. (He told WTNH in this story that he and the landlord had feuded over unpaid rent. Vanessa Watkins, the tenant’s sister, told the Independent Wednesday morning that her brother is in the process of trying to find a new apartment. She said the dispute was over May’s rent, and that someone had removed her brother’s bedroom door prior to the rooster/fish incident.)

Ramos, LCI’s deputy director, couldn’t reach Smarck by phone. Coleman did, and handed his Samsung cell to Ramos, who proceeded to enumerate to the landlord violations he was finding at the house. He told Smarck to fix them. He also said he’d leave a licensing form with Coleman and mail a second copy.

The phone was then handed to a reporter, who asked Smarck if he was the one who had put the dead animals in the tenant’s bed.

“I’m living two hours from there,” in Brooklyn, he responded. “I don’t live there.”

Did he stop by the house Monday to put the dead animals in the bed?

“Let me tell you. This is my house. Anything [happens], I take full responsibility. But nobody can prove [me] guilty. Anybody can say what they want. If they can prove it fine.”

He was asked again: Did he do it?

“I work in Brooklyn,” he responded — and repeated the answer when asked again. Finally, he said, “I cannot tell you the question.”

Superintendent Coleman said only he, the landlord, and the three second-floor tenants have keys to that apartment.

“I don’t wanna live here no more!” he added. He said he plans to move.

“This is America. It’s not Haiti, or wherever they do that stuff.”

In the meantime, Inspector Mazzada had him run down the street to buy batteries to replace dead ones found in some of the house’s smoke alarms. And he asked Coleman to dispose of the trash in the two blue bins at curbside. It was stinking up the street.