Black, moldy drywall is about the last thing you want to see when you look inside your walls.
"There are rolly-pollies in there, there's little bugs, the mold is black green and growing hair already so it's been there for a long time," said Jonathan Weiss of his bathroom wall.
Weiss said he reached through the soggy wall inside the only bathroom in his unit and found nasty mold.
"It completely disgusting," he said. "I don't even see that outside on the ground. There's not even a bug out there because they're all in my wall. That's a tropical forest for them."
It started when he says he saw black mold in the corner of the bathroom wall, and told maintenance about it.
"'That's not mold, that's not mold,'," Weiss said maintenance told him. "And they was not mold."
Then he noticed the walls were squishy, so the maintenance man pulled off the baseboard.
"He pulls it off and its completely black behind it, so, therefore, there's mold already growing at the bottom, it's not something that happened overnight. It's something that's been in the walls for a long time now," said Weiss.
But Weiss said the apartment management and maintenance have done nothing to fix it.
"He continues to tell me I'm crazy, I don't know what I'm talking about, it's not mold," said Weiss. "Ok well, there's a petting zoo inside my wall."
13 Action News went to the leasing office at Catalina Gardens, where the woman inside promptly asked us to turn off our camera. The woman in the leasing office told 13 Action News they had a plan to get rid of the mold in Weiss' apartment. As we pressed her for what exactly that plan was, her story changed and she said it was not mold.
"I'm renting from these people that have no care whatsoever for their tenants," said Weiss.
If you find yourself in a similar situation, you have rights. The Civil Law Self-Help Center gave us a good checklist:
1. Determine if your problem is "essential" or "nonessential."
2. Mail your landlord written notice
3. Wait to see if your landlord makes repairs
4. If the landlord does not make repairs or attempt to repair things, enforce your rights
You can get more detailed information from the Civil Law Self-Help Center here.
