Judge Stone: Landlords can't control everything.
New Haven’s new housing court judge ruled that a Newhallville landlord isn’t on the financial hook for thefts allegedly perpetrated by one rooming house tenant against another — in part because the owner doesn’t have “exclusive control” over what goes on in a renter’s room.
State Superior Court Judge Alayna Stone handed down that decision Thursday in the civil damages case Merlietha Geathers v. Galina Zalman.
Geathers, a tenant at a Hazel Street rooming house owned and also occupied by Zalman, sought $200,000 from her landlord for allegedly failing to protect her over the past year and a half from the frequent break-ins and harassment of a neighbor, Gerald Haag. During a recent trial in that case, Zalman and Haag denied all wrongdoing, and Geathers presented no documentary evidence proving that Haag was indeed responsible for the alleged thefts.
In her four-page decision, Stone ruled in Zalman’s favor. She found that Geathers had not proven by a “fair preponderance of the evidence” that her landlord had failed to take reasonable measures to keep her tenant safe or that she had intentionally inflicted emotional distress.
Stone articulated the legal standards for the former claim in a section of her decision entitled, “Duty To Keep Common Areas Safe.”
There, she quoted a 2002 state court decision in the case Wilcox v. Renaissance Management Co. as stating that a landlord has a duty “to use reasonable care to keep the common areas of its premises reasonably safe from the intentional or criminal acts of others, including other tenants.”
Stone then quoted another New Haven housing-focused state court precedent — this time a 2023 decision in the case Parker v. Elm City Communities Housing Authority of New Haven — as making clear that, where illegal actions occur outside of an “area under exclusive control of the landlord, and [are] not caused by a known defect, there is no duty on the landlord to protect tenants.”
Which brought the city’s housing court judge back to the case before her.
Geathers claimed that Zalman “breached her duty” by failing to stop Haag from breaking into Geathers’s room and stealing her stuff. “However, all of the actions complained of occurred in an area over which Defendant did not have exclusive control, namely, Plaintiff’s room,” Stone wrote.
Stone noted that Geathers testified during the recent trial in this case that she had bought several locks for her rented room, and had refused to give her landlord a key for those locks.
“Defendant does not have a duty to prevent criminal activity for an area over which she has neither control nor access,” Stone wrote. To impose such a duty, Stone continued, quoting again from state Judge Robin Wilson’s decision in the Parker v. Elm City Communities case, would “create strict liability for any injury that occurs on the landlord’s premises, regardless of whether they are in exclusive control over that area.”
In a part of the Parker v. Elm City Communities decision that Stone did not quote from, Wilson expounded on the potential consequences of requiring such a duty of landlords.
“If landlords owed a duty to ensure the protection of tenants within their apartment units, then litigation between tenants and landlords would increase tenfold,” Wilson wrote in 2023. “Tenants would have a right of action against landlords for events that take place outside of the exclusive control of the landlord.”
Stone concluded this section of her ruling by reiterating that Geathers did not adequately prove her case that Haag was indeed stealing her stuff, nor that Zalman had a responsibility to do more to stop those thefts.
Stone also ruled that Geathers had not succeeded in proving a second claim that Zalman had intentionally inflicted emotional distress on her. Stone wrote, “As Plaintiff has not proven, by a fair preponderance of the evidence, either of her claims, the Court enters judgment in favor of Defendant.”