It was raining on Feb. 21, 2019, but Samantha Conner wasn’t allowed to take shelter under the awning outside the Chateaux Holly Hills apartment complex in northern Columbus.
The landlord, Kevin Casteel, told her she had to leave the property entirely, not just the unit in which she and her son had lived since November 2016. Conner had missed a rent payment 16 days earlier, and Casteel arrived at her door unannounced with Lowndes County District 2 Constable Sonny Sanders and ordered her to leave.
“He was ranting, he was laughing when he said I couldn’t take anything (with me),” Conner told The Dispatch on Monday. “He told me he wanted me gone, that all my belongings and all my son’s belongings were his. He was mocking me and called me crazy. … He told the constable, ‘I told you she was crazy.'”
A Lowndes County Justice Court ruling allowed Conner to wait until the end of the month to pay her rent, and Casteel agreed to this ruling, according to court documents.
She did not know that Casteel sought an eviction and a warrant of removal from a different justice court judge after the ruling. She also claims he refused to take payment on her behalf from others who tried to step up and help her after he evicted her.
Conner still does not know where anything she left behind in that apartment ended up. Casteel told her as she was leaving that he was going to sell all of her belongings, according to court documents.
Conner filed a federal lawsuit in February in the Oxford division of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi against Sanders, Casteel, property owner James Brooks and ALLTIN, the limited liability corporation Brooks owns and through which he runs Chateaux Holly Hills.
Lawyers from the Low-Income Housing Clinic at the University of Mississippi School of Law are representing Conner in the case claiming Mississippi’s laws regulating landlords’ interactions with tenants are unconstitutional.
“It kind of has this language that the landlord can do whatever the landlord wants with (evicted tenants’ personal property), including the way I think bad-faith landlords are reading it, to mean they can just take it for themselves,” said Desiree Hensley, an Ole Miss associate professor of law and the Housing Clinic director.
U.S. District Judge Michael Mills dismissed the case without prejudice in October, meaning attorneys will re-file it after all parties have collected what the court deems sufficient evidence. Hensley said this will happen in May, since Mills stated in court documents that the Legislature could consider changes to state landlord-tenant laws during its 2021 session.
Ambiguity in state law
State law was “silent” about what a landlord can do with an evicted tenant’s property until 2019, when the state Legislature passed a bill that then-Gov. Phil Bryant signed, amending chapters 7 and 8 of Title 89, the portion of state statute that regulates real and personal property.
Chapter 7 allows a tenant to challenge an eviction in court, but Hensley cited the second subparagraph of Section 31 as an example of the language the suit challenges: “If the judge grants possession of the premises to the landlord and you do not remove your personal property, including any manufactured home, from the premises before the date and time ordered by the judge, then the landlord may dispose of your personal property without any further legal action.”
“A good-faith landlord’s perspective” would interpret the law as allowing a landlord to clean out a unit if a tenant “has mostly moved out or has left some old furniture behind” so another tenant can move in, Hensley said.
However, the law does not provide a specific amount of time in between the issuance of a warrant of removal, which costs a landlord only $50, and the tenant’s required departure.
“The landlord could turn around, pay the $50, get the warrant, show up at your house with the constable and steal all your stuff the same day that you’re in court,” Hensley said. “There’s no delay built in that would give the tenant the time between contesting the legality of the eviction and having to vacate before their property is disposed of.
“The tenant would have to vacate the unit entirely before the court ever determined the eviction was lawful in order to not lose all their belongings,” she added. “… Nobody can vacate their entire home before they go to court and a judgment is entered against them. It’s too expensive and uncertain and unfair. It puts tenants in this position of having to guess what the outcome is going to be.”
Casteel evicted Conner the same day he received the warrant of removal, according to federal court documents.
Similar language appears several times throughout Chapter 7, including in subparagraph 2 of Section 35, which states that a unit will be “deemed abandoned” if a tenant has not removed all personal property from the unit by the time they have received the summons to court for the hearing.
Conner’s situation is not uncommon in Mississippi, Hensley said, since the Housing Clinic plans to try similar cases. The Mississippi Center for Justice, a nonprofit law firm focused on racial and economic justice, has also heard from potential clients about these situations, she said.
In September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a moratorium on evictions for millions of rental units nationwide that will last through this month in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) banned evictions through the end of July.
Hensley said unemployment relief funds provided by the CARES Act allowed some tenants to pay rent when they would not otherwise have been able to. However, some landlords already would shut off tenants’ utilities to evict them indirectly, and this has increased since direct evictions have been prohibited, she said.
Even without a public health crisis, some Mississippi landlords still feel “emboldened” to keep an evicted person’s property, Hensley said.
“I don’t know that the pandemic has worsened that in particular,” she said. “I think it’s just ever-present.”
‘I’m ready to get back to living’
Casteel seized things that meant a great deal to Conner, she told The Dispatch, such as family heirlooms, her college degree and her computer and external hard drive, and told Sanders to arrest her if she tried to take things with her as she left.
“He was telling the constable to rush me, and that’s what the constable did,” Conner said. “Everything that he was telling the constable to do, he was obliging him.”
Sanders could not be reached for comment. Casteel declined to comment and deferred to Jack Hayes, an attorney with Stone and Hayes in Columbus representing ALLTIN, Brooks and Casteel.
Hayes and Sanders’ attorney, Danny Griffith of Jacks Griffith Luciano in Cleveland, both declined to comment on an ongoing case.
Hensley said Sanders’ argument in his defense is qualified immunity, the legal principle that prevents government officials from being held responsible for allegations of violating a plaintiff’s rights. Qualified immunity often protects law enforcement officers from being charged with taking a person’s life.
Conner did not return to a permanent living situation for six months. She briefly stayed with a friend and in a hotel but found herself sleeping outside for a time. Her son was a senior in high school, three months from graduating, but he was still a minor and therefore not allowed to stay with her while she was homeless. He stayed with a relative instead.
“He started getting in trouble. He was really struggling with this like any kid (would),” Conner said. “I had to tell my son he didn’t even have a home to come home to. He was at school when it happened.”
She was referred to the Housing Clinic after she called the West Point office of North Mississippi Rural Legal Services, and she said she is confident that the law will be on her side when the case goes back to court next year.
Losing her property was the material equivalent of a sexual assault, Conner said, meaning the violation has permanently changed her, and her goal in seeking legal action is to make sure no one else goes through what she went through.
“I feel like I’m just existing, and I’m ready to get back to living,” Conner said. “Us getting the justice we deserve will help me get back on the path to living.”
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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