GOSHEN – A former resident of Liberty Green Senior Apartments in Warwick has filed a lawsuit against the facility’s owner, Jonah Mandelbaum and his companies, Warwick Properties, Inc. and Devon Management Corp., claiming her state and federal rights were violated when her apartment was sprayed with “toxic pesticides more than 40 times throughout 2017 and January 2018” to rid it of bedbugs.
The claim by Victoria Palmieri maintained the spraying was not effective and was making the elderly residents, including herself, sick. The legal complaint said she has “a severe pesticide allergy, developed asthma from the excessive spraying and other residents experienced a variety of ill effects, including difficulty in breathing, headaches, nausea, burning eyes, vomiting, dizziness, coughing, scratchy throat, and mental confusion.”
Palmieri’s attorney, Christopher Watkins, said in January, she prepared a petition signed by more than half of Liberty Green’s 87 residents urging management to discontinue using pesticides and to use “a more effective, and non–dangerous, heat treatment instead.”
She maintains the management at the facility told her that “anyone who doesn’t like spraying can leave” and that heat treatment “costs too much.
Watkins said the pesticide spraying “violates the law in multiple ways.” He said a residential landlord “must make reasonable accommodations to a resident’s known medical condition or disability. Here, there was no attempt to accommodate Ms. Palmieri. Instead, after she presented her petition, they forced her to leave.” He said “retaliation is also illegal under federal and state law.”
Liberty Green owner Mandelbaum, meanwhile, told Mid-Hudson News that “we do what is necessary on location as required by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.”
