How Is This Legal?
From the CBC: Reporters root through San Bernardino shooters’ apartment on live TV.
While it is fairly obvious that the couple murdered people, they haven’t been convicted of any crime at this time. The landlord allowed the media to rummage through the couple’s apartment. There was property that now belongs to the couple’s child in that apartment, and there is no mention of the family agreeing to this. The landlord did it as soon as the police released it from their custody.
In the state of Florida, the landlord would find him/herself in being sued for this. There are rules and laws, with which I am familiar as there have been deaths in the apartments my Mother managed, and I now manage. You lock the place up until the next of kin releases you from liability.
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California law allows the landlord to let people enter the property while the previous tenant’s personal property is still in the place for purposes of repair, maintenance, or to show the property to prospective future tenants. But a quick check of California law shows that the lease passes on to the estate at the time of death and you have to follow California’s landlord-tenant law until you officially evict the estate or the estate voluntarily leaves, and even at that, you have to give them 18 days notice to retrieve the left-behind personal property. And that law most definitely does *not* allow letting the media into your (or the estate’s) apartment with no notice and no warning!
In short, this landlord just violated California’s landlord-tenant law big time. If the family is interested in suing him, he’s in big, BIG trouble.
Yeah, when I lived in SoCal my landlord gave me 24 hours notice if he needed access to my place. Hell, if you go in for anything other than an emergency without notification you risk a claim for something missing.
And one more thing, even if they had lived and were arrested, the landlord would still be required to give notice of abandonment 15 days after the last rent check was due, would still be required to secure the personal property and then give 18 days notice before either auctioning them off, or, if valueless, trashing them out, would still have to act as if they were still in a position to actually comply. This frustrates landlords greatly, but it’s the law. Penalties when landlords execute “self help” and just trash out personal property are stiff, and there are legal aid organizations here in California that relish the challenge of taking on landlords, winning, and subsisting on their share of the winnings.
That’s pretty much the same as Florida, with each step costing over $200 for filing and service in my county.
They’ve reduced the requirements a bit here in California so you can use 1st class mail to all known addresses and post on doorway rather than requiring service via a process server, but if the personal property is valued at over $700 you still are going to end up out of pocket on the process because you have to hire a professional auction company to auction it off, you can’t just trash it or sell it yourself, and the notice of the auction must be published in a newspaper of record, it can’t just be mailed or posted. It’s annoying as heck for landlords, but that’s the law, so …
Needless to say, allowing the news media in to paw over the possessions before a notice of abandonment has even been posted is entirely illegal under that law.
In Florida these ‘fees’ have more than doubled so Repugs could ‘cut taxes’, and there is no way they are going to reduce the service requirement. We are, however not required to auction contents if we get a default ruling from the judge. It most cases it does cost the haul the contents to the landfill.
They had to get process servers out of the loop here in California during the period 2008-2012 because the process servers were totally overwhelmed serving foreclosure notices to the point where illegal detainers and abandonments were taking four months between filing and court because landlords couldn’t find anybody to serve them. Needless to say when you have rich and powerful people out of major bucks because they have people living illegally in their buildings without paying rent and no way to get them out, there will be a change. So post-and-mail was added to the list of ways to serve illegal detainers and abandonments.
I am frankly amazed that CNN and MSNBC even allowed their reporters to enter that apartment. Each and every one of their reporters who entered that reporter is guilty of misdemeanor trespass with a penalty of up to 4 months in jail and up to $1,000 fine. Don’t they still have corporate lawyers working for them? Or did they lay them all off to save on expenses!?
This whole case has gotten weird, and, yes, the certainly trespassed and didn’t even consider that the apartment was no longer considered a crime scene, and had reverted to private property.
Landlords aren’t part of the Florida elite, like citrus, sugar, cattle, and other major business sectors. Law enforcement and the courts need these fees to continue to exist because just about every other tax that was used to pay for service has been reduced. I’m sure that there is some level of ‘encouragement’ for officers to issue tickets to generate revenue.
Process servers in Florida pay a fee to the state for each paper they serve?
The actual court fees here in California have risen higher each year, but the bigger expense is paying the publication fees to the newspapers. When rent is averaging over $2K/month in many areas, though, the cost of service is the least of landlords’ problems. The delays caused by a shortage of process servers was a far bigger issue that led to mail-and-post as the new standard for notices of abandonment and abandoned personal property.
Deputy sheriffs are the process servers, so the county and state get all of the money.
There is no public notification requirement for this action.
The amount of service needed surpassed the ability of deputy sheriffs to serve papers long ago here in California, so in most of the state process servers are private parties bonded and licensed with the state. It’s *permissible* for deputy sheriffs to serve papers, but the reality is that most California Sheriff’s departments won’t do it, it takes too many people off patrol to do things they don’t feel are important. Tends to increase the amount of sewer service though, which often is not caught until several people show up in court after default judgements all claiming that the same process server didn’t actually serve them. At which point said process server’s license gets revoked and bond used to pay off those default judgements…
The deputies who serve court orders aren’t the regular road deputies, and many are reservists, so there are a lot of them and they don’t cost much. They can staple papers to the door of the last known address and that is legal service in Florida.