Thomas Breen photo
Jennifer Williams and her son Elijah Hall.
The upstairs tenants of a West River home at the center of an ongoing legal battle over city lead inspection protocol have filed a lawsuit against the city for failing to protect a child’s health with the timely investigation and enforcement of the abatement of lead paint hazards.
The tenants and their lawyer are calling on the city to take over the lead abatement work that is required by city and state law to be done at the property, and they argue that the city should recoup the costs of that work from the landlord by placing a lien on the home.
On Wednesday afternoon, New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA) Attorney Amy Marx filed an application for injunctive relief and an order to show cause with the New Haven Superior Court on behalf of 2‑year-old Elijah Hall and his mother, Jennifer Williams, who live on the second floor of 75 Sherman Ave. Marx filed the lawsuit against the City of New Haven, Health Department Director Byron Kennedy, and Director of Environmental Health Paul Kowalski.
City spokesperson Laurence Grotheer said on Wednesday afternoon that this reporter’s questions were the first he heard of the lawsuit, and therefore he could not comment. The city’s health department has repeatedly refused to discuss its controversial handling of lead paint matters.
Click here to download a copy of the lawsuit.
75 Sherman Ave.
For the past month and a half, the landlord and downstairs tenants at 75 Sherman Ave. have been engaged in a lawsuit in New Haven Housing Court in which the landlord initially attempted to evict the tenants for non-payment of rent, and the tenants responded that the apartment presented a health hazard to their 1‑year-old child.
The tenants, Majid Muhammad and Raihana Akhdar, claimed that dangerously high levels of lead paint in their apartment contributed to their 1‑year-old’s consistently elevated blood lead level tests of 11 micrograms per deciliter (mg/dL) starting in December 2017.
Last week, after the landlord, Abdullah Soliman, dropped his eviction case against Muhammad and Akhdar, Marx, who is also representing the downstairs tenant in their legal proceedings, pivoted that case towards focusing as much on city lead inspection and post-abatement protocols as on the requirements of the landlord. Marx presented evidence alleging that the city’s Health Department signed off on incomplete lead abatement work for the ground-floor unit, thereby giving the downstairs tenants to move back into a potentially dangerous apartment.
During the hearing, city lead inspector Glenda Buenaventura testified that she did not thoroughly inspect every element of the exterior of the building that she had previously identified as lead hazardous. The judge ruled for that case to be continued to Thursday, June 7, to give the city time to make its argument that it conducted an adequate post-abatement inspection of the premises.
Wednesday’s lawsuit, however, comes from the building’s upstairs tenants, Williams and Hall. In the lawsuit, Marx argues that the city failed to follow city and state law in responding promptly to the lead hazards posed to Williams’s two-year-old child.
Amy Marx (right) in Housing Court two weeks ago.
“Plaintiff seeks this injunction for the reason that without such preliminary injunction in place,” Marx writes in the opening paragraph, “the Defendants’ failure to conduct a proper inspection of the source of his lead poisoning and failure to take over abatement of the lead hazards from the owner causes irreparable harm and injury to him by imposing undue risk to him of further irreversible, life-long neurological damage.”
Lead’s effects on children are irreversible. Even moderate levels of exposure (e.g. 10 – 25 mg/dL) can result in long-term impacts on IQ and memory and can result in permanent hyperactivity disorders and learning disabilities, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
In the lawsuit, the Legal Aid attorney lays out the narrative of how she alleges the city failed to protect Hall from lead poisoning.
She points out that the Health Department had an obligation to notify Hall’s family in December 2017, after the downstairs neighbors’ child tested as having an elevated blood lead level. She writes that the Health Department also had an obligation to conduct a lead paint inspection of the second floor unit within 30 days of their finding out about the downstairs’ tenants blood levels.
“The Health Department did not do so,” she writes.
Hall received his own regular blood lead level screening test in December 2017 during an annual pediatrician appointment. Hall tested as having a blood lead level of 6 micrograms per deciliter (mg/dL). In 2014, the CDC reported that any child with a blood lead level above 5 mg/dL had an “elevated,” or dangerously high, level of lead in his or her blood.
Throughout the lawsuit, the Legal Aid attorney points to city and state law that she argues requires the city’s Health Department to conduct a lead paint inspection at a property within 5 days of learning about a child with an elevated blood lead level at that property.
Marx points out that, in the months after the December blood lead test, the city failed to conduct an inspection. On May 1, she writes, Hall had another blood lead level test, and this time his levels had gone up a notch to 7 mg/dL.
She notes that the Health Department conducted an inspection of the second floor apartment on May 9, and found 153 interior locations with toxic levels of lead.
“To date,” Marx writes, “the landlord has taken no adequate action to abate the lead-based paint hazards in the interior of the plaintiff’s second floor apartment. To date, the landlord has taken no adequate action to abate the lead-based paint hazards in the exterior of the plaintiff’s second floor apartment, as the already proven inadequate abatement of the exterior of the unit has only been done for the bottom half of the building, not abating at all the window frames or sideboards of the second floor of the building.”
The lawsuit argues that the city violated city ordinances dictating the timely inspection and abatement of lead hazardous apartments, and that they failed to adequately inspect what she alleges to be inadequate abatement work.
The lawsuit calls on the city to conduct an immediate inspection to determine all sources of lead in the interior, exterior, and soil of the apartment; to prepare a lead abatement plan for the second floor unit; and to abate the property in accordance with the lead abatement plan; and to relocate the family, if necessary, to a safe residence as the abatement work is being done.
“Elijah is suffering irreparable harm from continuing to live in a unit with unabated lead hazards on the interior and exterior of his apartment,” she writes.
Previous coverage:
• City’s Lead Inspection Goes On Trial
• Eviction Withdrawn On Technicality
• 2nd Child Poisoned; Where’s The City?
• Carpenter With Poisoned Kid Tries A Fix
• High Lead Levels Stall Eviction
• 460 Kids Poisoned By Lead In 2 Years
• Bid-Rigging Claimed In Lead Cleanup
• Judge Orders Total Lead Paint Clean-Up
• Legal Aid Takes City To Task On Lead
There is no accountability in how the city is currently being run. Budgets are routinely violated; rules are manipulated for favor pet employees while others who fall out of favor for whatever reason including refusing to hire unqualified people in their departments to a fireman who was drunk and stoned on the job and at home - were kept on the payroll. LCI and the buiding department failed to properly inspect Norton Street, Church Street South and so many others.
This is just the latest chapter. We need a mayor who knows how to lead and to drive themselves. One that knows the employees, demands excellence and knows excellence when they see it - and failure as well. The real question is this: Is there a single city department that is being run well, efficiently and with excellence?