Clearwater renter fled a moldy apartment. Her landlord wants her to pay.

The first wet spot appeared in the playroom. Then came another in the dining room.

When Lauren DiAngelus tried to inspect the damp patch in the laundry room, the broom she used to poke at it broke straight through the saturated ceiling.

A mold analysis and lab test showed that DiAngelus’ apartment had high levels of mold spores in the air and dangerous black mold growing in her closet.

“Alarm bells were going off,” she said.

DiAngelus said the Grand Reserve at Park Isle Apartments in Clearwater mishandled the cleanup and may have caused the mold to spread. Now she is trying to break her lease without losing her security deposit and paying almost $1,500 on top of that for rent she claims she doesn’t owe.

General Services Corp., the company that owns the apartment, could not be reached for comment. The property manager, Iris Aliev, declined to comment.

This is the seventh installment of Housing Horror Stories, an occasional series exploring the challenges that Tampa Bay residents have faced navigating the local housing market.

DiAngelus and her fiance moved into the apartment with her 2-year old and 10-month-old in November. They spotted signs of water damage immediately and filed a maintenance request.

The apartment complex sent a worker to spray something over the damage, DiAngelus said. But that didn’t stop water from seeping in.

When another leak appeared in December, a maintenance worker told DiAngelus that a blocked dryer vent was causing the problem. A dryer repair person came and told her there was nothing wrong.

The next month, the bathtub leaked, soaking the carpet in the closet of the master bedroom. DiAngelus said the bathtub was never repaired.

Meanwhile, her family began experiencing coldlike symptoms — coughing, wooziness, headaches, congestion.

“Our whole entire bedroom reeked of mildew,” DiAngelus said. “I couldn’t go in there without getting a headache.”

Landlords are required to comply with local health and building codes, and every city and state has different regulations when it comes to mold, said Robin Stover, director of legal services at United Way of South Sarasota County and former deputy housing director for Gulf Coast Legal Services.

Tenants should check to see if the lease requires the apartment to provide mold remediation.

Still, “mold itself is a tricky subject because sometimes it’s a situation where it’s not visible,” Stover said. In those cases, tenants should do their best to collect concrete evidence of mold. Stover recommended that tenants reach out to local codes and building departments to request an inspection or call in a private specialist if they can afford it.

For DiAngelus, the last straw came when a huge spot of mold appeared in the bedroom closet. She paid to have a licensed mold specialist come and inspect it. Lab results from the samples he took tested positive for stachybotrys, also known as black mold.

“It’s toxic,” said Corey Campbell, the owner of Mold Dr Pro who inspected DiAngelus’ apartment. “You can breathe it in and it can cause a lot of harm.”

Black mold will not kill you, but Campbell said it can trigger allergic reactions, like sneezing, coughing, congestion, itchy eyes and skin and shortness of breath. Everyone reacts differently to black mold, but it is especially harmful for those with existing autoimmune problems, allergies or asthma.

DiAngelus sent the results to the apartment complex and demanded they hire a licensed mold specialist to clean up the problem immediately.

The first person that came out that day could not produce a license, DiAngelus said, so she sent him away. A few hours later, the apartment sent another company out to help. DiAngelus said as soon as she let them in the door she could tell something was amiss.

“There was no protective gear,” she said. “A guy just started sawing into the wall where there was mold and pulling out wet insulation. He was just walking around the apartment with it.”

Campbell said that proper protocol would have been to contain the room beforehand and seal any toxic materials before disposing them. Without those safety measures, mold can spread.

“With babies in the apartment like she had, I would have gotten out of there,” Campbell said.

DiAngelus and her family packed up everything in 36 hours and moved out with 12 months still left on the 14-month lease.

At this point, if she wanted to cancel the lease, Stover said DiAngelus should have sent the landlord a written notice via certified mail explaining that the unit was uninhabitable due to mold and the company was not in compliance with the lease terms. The landlord then has seven business days to respond.

“If they don’t reply and come up with a plan to fix the problem, then the tenant has a very good basis to state that they’d like to terminate the lease agreement,” Stover said.

Though DiAngelus and her family were able to find a new apartment fairly quickly, Stover acknowledged it’s not always that easy. If a tenant has no choice but to stay, they can send a letter requesting that the landlord reduce the rent to make up for deficiencies in the apartment.

“For example, if the rent is $1,200 and you can’t use one of the bathrooms because it’s covered in mold, then the tenant has every reason to ask the rent be reduced by $200 until the situation is remedied.”

Stover noted that, until the tenant and landlord come to an agreement in writing, tenants should continue paying the full rent. Florida’s landlord tenant law has specific rules for withholding rent. If they’re not followed to the letter, it can result in an eviction.

After weeks of back-and-forth, DiAngelus’ property manager agreed to waive $5,510 in “termination fees,” according to an email she received. Still, the email said DiAngelus would not get her $1,400 security deposit back and that she must pay $1,499.13 to cover February rent and part of March.

DiAngelus said she tried to make arrangements to return the keys but was repeatedly told that the employee she needed was on vacation. The property manager refuted this in her email.

“When a property manager decides to keep a rental deposit, the burden is on the property manager to send a written notice to that tenant stating that they are going to keep the security deposit,” Stover said.

DiAngelus said she received no such letter. Now she is left to decide: “Do we just pay the $1,500 and let them win or do we keep fighting it and possibly end up with an eviction on our renter history?”

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