The city of Laurel announced Oct. 29 that it is working with Avondale Apartments to remedy a mouse infestation that prompted a suit from one of the tenants.
In a press release, the city said it first received a tenant complaint about mice Aug. 28. A month later, after receiving additional complaints, city inspectors visited 135 apartments and found evidence of rodent activity in 34 of them, the release said.
The release said the city has issued a remediation plan that calls for additional pest controls including sealing rodent access points throughout the building, improving sanitation and trash procedures, ongoing monitoring of pest activity and monthly reports to the city.
Gates Hudson, a full-service real estate management company based in Merrifield, Va., manages the complex. The company declined to comment for this article.
Avondale (8301 Ashford Blvd.), was built in 1987 and is an 11-story building with 237 units. It has a 4.2 rating on a 5-point scale on the Apartment.ratings.com website, with 178 verified reviews. All of the reviews were posted in 2024 or earlier.
Tenant Dori Olaseha filed suit against Avondale in Prince George’s County District Court Sept. 16. She is seeking $30,000 from the company for “property damage, medical expenses, lost wages and emotional distress.” She has testified at the last two city council meetings, first on Sept. 22 to call for city action and second on Oct. 27 to express disappointment at the city’s response. “Many of the same issues remain unresolved,” she said.
Joining Olaseha at the Sept. 22 meeting was former city councilmember Martin Mitchell, who said that he had helped her poll other residents at Avondale. In an Oct. 6 email to city and county officials, Mitchell said that he and Olaseha spoke with about 100 residents, and “surprisingly enough, about ¾’s of those units canvassed had similar issues.”
In an interview, Olaseha said she moved into a one-bedroom, ground-floor apartment with her 13-year-old son, Xerxes, on April 12. Her rent was $1,700 a month. Within a week, she had discovered rodent droppings, heard scratching noises in the walls and found a hole in the baseboard, she said. The second week she spotted mice running across the floor and on top of her stove.
Management put sticky traps in her unit, but that didn’t resolve the problem, she said. Olaseha was working from home and home-schooling her son, and said that the presence of rodents increasingly jeopardized their being at home.
By July, Olaseha had approached management about ending her lease, but they told her she needed to give them more time. By August, mice were leaving droppings in her kitchen cabinets, getting into food, and urinating on her furniture and clothes. Olaseha contacted city officials about her situation in late August.
Olaseha said she and her son also were experiencing respiratory and digestive issues. She showed a discharge document from the University of Maryland Laurel Medical Center’s emergency department that said she was treated for a cough and shortness of breath Sept. 11. Olaseha expressed anger that the city press release about the situation stated that there were no emergency room visits for breathing difficulties in August and September.
Olaseha said Avondale paid for her and her son to stay in a hotel for several days and offered to let her break her lease and receive four months’ rent as compensation. Olaseha said she decided to sue when the management company refused to reimburse her for belongings ruined by mouse urine; she was also denied her request that Avondale cover her first month’s rent at an apartment elsewhere.
The Laurel Independent interviewed two other Avondale tenants with similar rodent problems who also complained of mold, water dripping through the ceiling from upstairs apartments and broken elevators.
Leland Rudner, an entomologist with American Pest, a 100-year-old pest-control company based in Fulton, said mice infestations require intensive remediation measures. One breeding pair can produce 1,250 mice in a year, he noted, saying, “They can get out of hand really quickly.”
Rudner said the first step is to reduce root causes such as ground-floor openings and exposed food and trash. “If you don’t remedy those conducive conditions, you don’t get anywhere,” he commented. Rudner said that the next step would be to inspect the entire building — all apartments, utility rooms, trash shoots, common areas —to assess mouse activity. Nontoxic metal traps, called tin cats, can be installed to catch the rodents, he said.
Remediation can require a monitoring system, too, consisting of infrared sensors that detect mice’s body heat. “We set these monitors throughout a building … to confirm we have low activity and no activity,” Rudner explained. And pest-control inspectors need to return for weekly visits over time to assure that no resurgence occurs, he added. “If you have any one tenant on every floor who is not doing their part, it’s very hard to achieve full success,” Rudner said.