After fatal fire, Syracuse landlord rents unit with ash-stained ceiling, no smoke detectors

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Ash and smoke stains cover the ceiling of Tawanda O’Neal’s apartment, a daily reminder of a fire that killed a 13-year-old girl, and of the brazen indifference of the building’s owner, a notorious city landlord.

About three months after that deadly fire tore through the home, the landlord re-rented the apartment at 722 Pond St. to O’Neal. According to O’Neal, the landlord didn’t clean the smoke stains or paint the ceiling. He didn’t replace a bathtub blackened by ash. He didn’t mention there had been a fatal fire.

An inspection two weeks ago found the apartment had no smoke detectors. O’Neal said a worker installed two detectors shortly after that inspection. She said it was the first time the apartment had smoke detectors since she moved in in 2016.

O’Neal only learned that someone had died in her home after she moved in. She walked out her front door one evening to find a group of people arm-in-arm in her lawn, uttering prayers and holding glass-jarred candles. It was a vigil for the dead teen-aged girl.

Now, after three years of fighting with that landlord, O’Neal has finally saved enough money to move her family out of the apartment and “close this chapter of her life.” And even though she’s never met him, she wants to warn Syracuse tenants about renting from her nightmare landlord, John Kiggins.

According to county records, the home is owned by Endzone Properties, a limited liability company whose president is Kiggins. Endzone owns about 50 properties in Syracuse.

Endzone has been slapped with 11 lead paint violations in the last two years. It’s been sued multiple times by the city of Syracuse. Kiggins himself spent time in jail in 1991 for mortgage fraud and again, briefly, in 2006 for refusing to address code violations on his properties.

The company continues to accrue multi-family homes throughout the city. In June, for example, Endzone closed on a two-family property at 1407 W. Colvin St. for $18,500.

Messages left last week at Endzone’s office were not returned.

Kiggins has been a thorn in the side of code inspectors for years. A city attorney once labeled him “public enemy No. 1” among Syracuse slumlords.

At the end of last year, more than a dozen of Kiggins’ properties had code violations that had gone unfixed for more than a month. Endzone Properties is among the city’s 10 worst code scofflaws, according to data provided to syracuse.com by City Hall.

The Jan. 28, 2016 fire at 722 Pond St. started because tenants were using candles to heat the apartment, fire inspectors said at the time. There was no heat or power hooked up. The building had several other open code violations.

Five days later, on Feb. 2, a code inspector deemed the apartment unfit for living and issued additional code violations. Those violations said the owner needed to put a new protective coating on the walls, ceiling and floors. In other words, the smoke-damaged apartment needed to be painted.

The next month, an inspector declared those violations satisfied. It’s clear now, however, that the ceiling was never painted. It’s not clear whether smoke detectors were installed, though O’Neal says there weren’t any when she moved in.

The apartment seems to have slipped through the cracks at an often overburdened code enforcement department, and quickly returned to profitable use for Kiggins.

“He didn’t paint, but the complaint was closed out back in 2016,” said Ken Towsley, director of Syracuse code enforcement. “This obviously could have been handled a little differently.”

Towsley said the inspector who handled that case has since retired.

O’Neal, 38, rented the apartment in April 2016, less than three months after the fire. She’d had a heart attack that took her out of work and needed a place to live. She couldn’t afford both a security deposit and first month’s rent on most apartments — an up-front bill of around $1,500.

The property manager at the Pond Street apartment — a man she knows only as “Sam” — was willing to work with her to get her into the building.

O’Neal said when she initially toured the apartment she was promised things would be fixed before she moved in. She didn’t have other options for housing, and was living at a friend’s house with her children. So she signed a lease.

After she moved in, work stopped on the apartment, she said.

O’Neal lives in the upstairs apartment of the two-family house along with two daughters, a son and a grandson. She’s a single mother. There’s another family in the downstairs apartment.

O’Neal’s rent is $765 per month and does not include utilities. Part of that was paid by public assistance for several years while she was out of work and recovering from the heart attack. She worked as a certified nursing assistant for 16 years before the heart attack.

She started working again this April. She got a job working on blood drives for the Red Cross. She’s been saving since then for a down payment on a new place to live.

Last year, after first complaining to her landlord about bedbugs, O’Neal called Syracuse Code Enforcement. An inspector issued a citation, but could not address the infestation.

Within a week, O’Neal was served an eviction notice. She said that eviction was retaliation for her complaint. A judge eventually threw out that case. The landlord would try at least two more times to evict her, unsuccessfully.

“This is why a lot of people don’t speak up,” she said. “I’m working now and in a better situation, but I think about all the people who are not…They can’t do anything about it.”

Workers sometimes have come to make repairs to the apartment, O’Neal said, but the work is shoddy. A hole in the roof led to a leak in one of her daughters’ bedrooms. A messy ceiling patch was installed and covered in caulk. The daughter said it still leaks sometimes, since the hole in the roof hasn’t been fixed.

“It was raining in her bedroom for months,” O’Neal said.

A syracuse.com reporter made two visits to the apartment this month.

The faucet on the bathtub has broken loose from its fixture. That, too, is covered in caulk in what appears to be a half-hearted repair attempt. The front door doesn’t close or lock. The apartment’s interior door is hanging off the jamb. There’s a broken window in a bedroom, a missing drywall panel in the living room and the stove doesn’t work.

Last year, the refrigerator stopped working, O’Neal said. After a week, the property manager brought a replacement. When she opened it, there was a cockroach inside. She demanded a new refrigerator. He brought another one with no bugs in it, but the front panel below the door was broken off.

Several of the windows in the house are boarded up from the fire. Birds have made nests in the attic and covered it in feces.

In winter months, O’Neal’s heating costs for the 1,164 sq. ft. apartment are over $300. She loses heat through broken windows and the broken door, she said. She has to keep the heat on around the clock, since the pilot light on the furnace is broken.

O’Neal said she’s given up on calling the property management company to fix things, since nothing gets done. She said the landlord often promises someone will fix something, then never shows.

Code inspectors issue citations, but the landlord ignores them.

An inspector toured the apartment two weeks ago. He found 22 violations, including missing smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, a broken front door, bird feces covering the attic and broken electrical outlets and light fixtures.

There’s also an infestation violation that’s been open since 2018, according to Towsley, the director of city codes. O’Neal said there were bedbugs in the apartment. She asked the property manager to fix the problem, she said. He brought her a can of bug bomb from the hardware store.

This week, O’Neal will finally move out. She’s working on finding a new place for her family to live and hopes she can secure housing by Wednesday, when she has to leave. If not, she’ll spend a few weeks living with family while she searches.

Moving, she said, is expensive and hard. Rents have gone up, and most places she’s looking at cost at least $900 a month. That means she would need $1,800 up front to pay a security deposit plus the first month’s rent. Then there’s the cost to rent a U-Haul, and any other costs that come up in a move.

But it’s worth it to get her family out of that house.

“I thank god for my job because that’s how we’re getting the hell out of here,” she said. “Before, being on public assistance, I had no options. There’s a stigma that comes along that [people on assistance] don’t deserve nice houses…Some people just fall on hard times.”

Source: syracuse.com