Markeshia Ricks Photo
Trachten, right, with potential buyers at Leander Gray’s former home.
The squatters and drug users living in the Sherman Avenue home of a former judge didn’t appreciate city inspectors bolting a steel door to the back of the house to keep them out.
Contributed Photo
A note from a squatter.
In fact, after they pried the door off and got back in, they left the city’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), a note on a couple of walls: “Fuck you LCI Bitches. Got my shit! Thanks for the challenge. I win.”
Game on.
There’s a judge involved. But he can’t order anyone to fix the mess.
The abandoned two-and-a-half-story one-family Colonial home in question, between Whalley Avenue and Goffe Street at 361 Sherman Ave., belongs to the estate of the late state Superior Court Judge Leander C. Gray, who died in Oct. 21, 2014.
The condition of the house was brought to the attention of LCI’s resident “zombie house slayer, Evan Trachten, last September.
Back then, LCI cited the property for violating the city’s anti-blight and property ordinance, and gave the estate 10 days to perform landscaping maintenance, cut the grass, remove dead tree branches from the lawn and remove debris from the property. Failure to do so, warned the letter from LCI, meant that the estate could be hit with a $100 a day fine.
A woman named Glosim Morgan, Gray’s former partner, signed for the letter.
LCI ultimately cleaned the property up and secured it. Then, over the winter, more problems turned up.
When Trachten came back to check on the property in February, not only did he find that the squatters were back. They had pried off the heavy duty door that had been placed on the back entrance in the garage.
Contributed Photo
Another note from a squatter.
He also received a tip from someone in the neighborhood that Gray had been an avid gun collector and likely left his firearms and ammunition behind in the house when he died.
Sure enough, not only was there guns and ammunition in the house. But someone had started carting it away.
Trachten called the cops in to come confiscate the rest of the arsenal. But as recently as this month, a stray bullet could be found among the mounds of clothes, shoes and other belongings that remain haphazardly strewn about the garage in the back of the house.
The squatters might have gotten their stuff back, but LCI had the last laugh. LCI has put up a thick, plywood door and used three heavy duty bolts to secure it shut. Scratch marks near the door frame show someone tried to get in, but the door has not been breached again.
Trachten has sent two more letters, one after the February re-inspection and another earlier this month. He would discover after the first letter that Morgan was the executrix for Gray’s estate. Though she signs for the letters, she has made no active effort to manage the property and it has since incurred a lien of about $5,000 from the city.
Glosim said in a phone conversation with the Independent from her home in Florida that Gray had named her as the executor of her estate while they were engaged to be married. Gray had moved to Florida after his retirement.
They later broke up, Gloism said. “He still kept me on the documents. We had a good relationship; he didn’t want to change it.”
When he died, “he kind of left me in a jam” in terms of straightening out the estate, Glosim said. She said she did dispose of assets in Florida and paid off debts. Selling the house back in New Haven proved more of a challenge: Utility liens and other debts added up to more than the $20,000 potential buyers were offering. So she didn’t end up selling the house.
At this point, she has closed out the estate. She will let the bank foreclose on the New Haven house and resell it.
Trachten finds a stray bullet among the refuse.
Meanwhile, the battle with squatters continues on Sherman Avenue.
“We win,” Trachten said. But he acknowledged a real win for the city and the neighbors who have to live with the eyesore and illegal activity the unkempt house attracts would be to get the estate to clean up the property, secure the broken garage and maintain its care, or even better, sell it.
After some sleuthing, Trachten found that the estate owes about $15,000 in taxes, and the bank might be ready to foreclose.
Grisly Discovery
Trachten with more interested buyers.
As it stands, the land is strewn with clothes and debris from furniture along its path of overgrown trees and brush. Fencing that separates it from neighboring property is broken down. LCI made a gruesome discovery during one inspection: a dead and decomposing cat.
Despite the mess, the house has attracted the attention of real estate investors. During the March inspection, two different sets of potential buyers stopped by to inquire about what was happening with the house and whether it might soon be for sale.
Leander Gray was known as a tough judge, famous for reprimands of defendants and of lawyers he considered ill-prepared. In 1998 he failed to win legislative approval to have his judicial appointment renewed because of a controversy over his handling of a sexual misconduct case.
Paul Bass contributed reporting.