Landlord Wants To Sue For Unpaid Rent After His Tenant Passed Away In His Bed & No One Noticed For Days
Sure he's within his legal rights to do so. But … has he ever heard of empathy?
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Just because something is legal doesn't make it right. Cheating on a spouse or partner, for instance, is perfectly legal, but most would agree it's not right. Breaking a promise: legal, but not right. Allowing someone to run for and become President when they have 34 felonies and counting: legal, it turns out, but — well, you get the picture.
But one landlord kind of takes the cake when it comes to the "legal but not ethical" debate. The move he wants to make falls pretty firmly in the nuanced area of things most normal, decent people would agree you absolutely shouldn't do even if you can. Suffice it to say he is not one of those people.
The landlord wants to sue a dead tenant for unpaid rent and cleaning fees after he passed away in his bed.
What to do when a tenant dies is a sticky situation that comes with lots of details most probably wouldn't think of, from legal ramifications to security concerns like whether the tenant made copies of the keys. It's a much more complicated situation than most of us would guess.
And at least in the States, landlords are typically entitled to be paid whatever rent remains on the lease out of the deceased person's estate.
But this landlord's situation falls into a bit of a gray area: His property is a vacation rental that his now-passed tenant stayed in for months, with, by the sounds of it, no real lease.
He wants to take legal action to get the money he feels he's owed — not the months and months of rent he would have collected had the man lived, but a paltry sum that is unlikely to make any difference in his business but cause a huge headache for the man's grieving family.
The landlord wants to sue the tenant's family for the rent that accrued while his death was investigated by authorities.
The landlord described his situation in a since-deleted Reddit post that many online have found pretty astonishing for its self-absorption.
He wrote that his tenant passed away and was only found two days later when his family became concerned and asked him to check on him.
@prstskrzkrk / X
"I'm in my 20s, and this was quite a harrowing experience to find someone passed away," he wrote, seemingly noting this as justification for how he plans to handle it.
He went on to explain that while the man always made full rent payments "without fail," he was occasionally a day or two late due to their loose and casual arrangement. This meant the man was already six days late on the rent by the time his body was found.
He wants to sue for these six days "plus the daily rent while the apartment was locked up with the personal belongings left inside... in case it was found to be a suspicious death and police would need to re-enter."
Finally, he wants to recover the £480 plus taxes he had to pay a biohazard company to remove the man's bed, which he says "was covered in blood and bodily fluid," forcing the apartment to be professionally decontaminated.
People were appalled by the landlord's desire to sue the man's family over $1500, given the obviously horrible death he suffered.
"I know this is incredibly morbid," the landlord wrote, "but I'm going to be a minimum £1200 down, and as a business, I must take the personal element out of this and look to recover the costs while respecting the family during this time."
But suing a family grieving what sounds a lot like suicide for what equates to about $1500 struck many as pretty much the opposite of "respecting the family during this time."
"Over £1000? Really?" one fellow Redditor wrote. A man on X was far more blunt. "In case you'd gone soft on landlords," he wrote, "here's one asking how he can make a dead man's family pay for cleaning the mattress his corpse rotted into, as well as rent his corpse rudely fell behind with."
He added, "that the first response is 'how can I make this corpse pay' is just beyond humanity," which pretty much sums it up.
"It's not personal, it's business" is nothing new, of course, but as another X user pointed out, situations like this are literally what insurance is for.
File a claim, have a heart, and leave the man's family alone. They've been through enough — one day, you might be in their shoes.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.