Squalid conditions at Fairmont Gardens aired in court
The Fairfax County Circuit Court heard a case today that shined a light on the filthy and inhumane conditions at Fairmont Gardens in Annandale.
Dean Sanchez, a former leasing agent, is suing the Donaldson Group, the company that owns the apartment complex. While Sanchez’s case alleges the property manager discriminated against him, his suit details tenants’ squalid living conditions.
Sanchez reports the apartments are infested with mice, bedbugs, roaches, and mold.
He says Donaldson refuses to address the problems and takes advantage of the tenants, most of whom are Spanish-speaking immigrants. Many of them don’t complain because they don’t speak English or fear retaliation because of their immigration status.
According to Sanchez: “Scattered glue traps line the carpeting of the building, the corpses of mice are left on the traps for days at a time. Bed bug and roach infestations run rampant in several apartments.”
In apartment bathrooms, he says, “walls are cracked and overrun by black mold. “The mold is so severe there is little left to do but gut the walls down to the studs and rebuild.”
He knows of one family who had to keep a cap on their newborn’s head because of the bedbugs. Other tenants woke up in the morning to find half a dozen mice on a sticky pad.
The Donaldson Group acquired Fairmont Gardens in spring 2021 and subsequently made improvements to the exteriors of the buildings. But Sanchez, who worked there from January to May 2022, said management failed to address the problems inside the apartments.
When he asked Donaldson to transfer him to another property, they refused, which Sanchez charges is retaliation for his complaints about the horrible living conditions.
Sanchez believes the manager at Fairmont Gardens, Quay Belle, discriminated against him because he is Latino, so he filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Related story: Annandale apartment complex gets a makeover
Sanchez cites several incidents involving Belle: She failed to report his suspicions of fraud by an employee, treated him with disrespect, and joked about a resident wanting to harm him. The bottom line, he says, is Belle, “was racist” and treated him and the Latino tenants “like dirt.”
The EEOC didn’t find a just cause for his claim but issued a “notice of suit,” meaning he could pursue the case in court.
Sanchez wrote the complaint himself and filed it with the Fairfax County Circuit Court on May 11. In it, he accuses Belle of harassment that included “abusive and unlawful conduct.” He had a difficult time meeting his leasing goals because Belle didn’t want to spend money to fix up vacant apartments in bad condition.
The Donaldson Group filed a motion to dismiss the case last month, but the judge gave Sanchez 21 days to amend his complaint by more clearly showing the harassment was related to discrimination.
The judge scheduled another hearing for June 24. Donaldson again moved to dismiss the case and the judge overruled it. The next step could be a trial or settlement. The fact that the judge didn’t dismiss the case gives Sanchez hope that his complaint is being taken seriously.
Sanchez notes Donaldson’s website celebrates the company’s values, with words like compassion, trustworthy, ethical, and a promise to provide an “exceptional customer experience.”
“This would be comical if the conditions at Fairmount Gardens weren’t so abominable,” he says.
“People deserve to live with a baseline level of dignity regardless of their financial circumstances,” Sanchez says. “They deserve to live without mice running over their feet or being woken at night by tiny insects sucking at their blood. We just want these people to be treated fairly,”
16 responses to “Squalid conditions at Fairmont Gardens aired in court”
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Disgusting, the entire complex should be leveled. These landlords along with FFX County continue to overwhelm Mason District with ghetto buildings for an overwhelming number of building complexes filled with poor immigrants. The rest of the County needs to take its share of this problem and enforce building and zoning codes that would eliminate this problem. These populations also need to be spread out and not concentrated as they are in Mason. This just perpetuates the ghettoization of the District. Penny Gross, stop sleeping on the job and do something for once.
Anyone that says that these communities are not ghettos, does not understand its definition: “a section of a city, especially a thickly populated slum area, inhabited predominantly by members of an ethnic or other minority group, often as a result of social pressures or economic hardships.”
I agree they need to get ride of fairmont garden apartment. Unfortunately, they are not the only apartments in the area that needs to be addressed.
I completely agree. The sooner the ghetto buildings are leveled, the better.
Penny Gross did get some minor improvements made at one of the complexes in Culmore back in the late 2000s, but that was putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. I voted against her the last time she ran and I’ll vote against her if she runs again.
This is not a surprise but rather a result of the decades-long ineffectiveness of Penny Gross as an advocate for the Mason District and the unwillingness of the entire Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to ensure all but the most basic governance and in particular, simply ignoring zoning infractions.
Apartments like Fairmont Gardens are all over the Mason District, as are single-family homes that have been converted to dormitories. Vape shops, discount stores, marginal niche businesses that come and go, clubs that attract hoodlums, and now even our own adult products store dot the landscape. Public schools with test scores showing a near straight-line decline in student performance for years, car racing, blatant criminal activity, rundown infrastructure — this is all the legacy of the lack of vision and concern on the part of Penny Gross and her colleagues on the Board of Supervisors.
Meanwhile, right next door, the city of Alexandria is starting on a project that will move a hospital, attract businesses with a broad customer base, and build apartments nearby, convenient to bus transportation. The contrast could not be more striking. It takes a positive and ambitious vision, determination, hard work, planning, and most of all, a concern for quality of life that the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors lacks, especially when it comes to the Mason District.
Agreed, Annandale keeps going down hill while other counties try to build up and bring in new and better bussiness. But, we have the porn store with a tobacco store near by!!😊
Same thing is going on over at Vistas of Annandale not to mention the junkies in the buildings
Calm down everyone. They just need pest control. I live in a big house on a big plot of land. Little critters come around. Plenty of philosophies about how to deal with them. But, again, calm down everyone.
Mrs. Franconia.. everyone would like to calm down but the way these people live is NOT right. One thing they do do is collect that rent!! There was a gentleman..ex resident who moved out get this a mouse bit his infant in the hand..now you tell people to calm down. People are angry they want to be heard..but I see the people here commenting not on anger but passion. So for all the people responding please keep it up. We are going to work on a protest very soon at Fairmont Gardens so their voices can be heard…more to come
Better conditions for Fairmonts Gardens residents is not what commenters here want. They want Fairmont Gardens residents to be relocated as far away from them as possible. They are blaming Penny Gross for allowing poor immigrants to live near them. Be careful who you allow to speak for you if this protest is about the voices of Fairmont Gardens being heard.
Folks want a dispersal, not an elimination. Mason has too poor immigrants, many in concentrations that is bringing the entire district down.
Some of the commenters should just spell it out and be honest. You want maids, nannies, gardeners and construction workers but you don’t want to them to have their own neighborhood or be able to live near you.
You conflate working people with criminals.
I don’t want a maid, a nanny, a gardener, or a construction worker. My wife and I do it all ourselves. But I don’t mind any of those folks living in the neighborhood. My neighbor is a construction worker. My friend is a gardener. My friends have live in nannies.
I’ll tell you what I could do without: drug addicts, illegal immigrants, criminals, panhandlers, speeders, jaywalkers, and all of the other things that are associated with low class people doing low class things that bring down the quality of life for middle class people working hard and going about their daily lives.
Not to mention the murders
Several units there at Fairmont Gardens should be condemned right now due to terrible unlivable conditions. Residents living there with live chickens roaming free within their apartments and multiple units are operating meth labs. Rental office has turned a blind eye to the gutter in which we call Wadsworth Ct.
I have law suit against fairmont garden too I like to meet him . This place is murdervile every day Somone gets killed rape or rob .