Talk about heartless!!
Man hit with bill in lover’s suicide
Apartment complex now plans to charge victim’s estate instead.
A column by Kevin Leininger
kleininger@news-sentinel.
“He was the most full-of-life person I’ve ever met. He could light up a whole room just by being there and was the kind of guy you liked the moment you met him,” Dustin Gentis said as he looked across the table at a photograph of Brock Carteaux, his roommate and partner for more than two years.
“I loved him.”
So when Gentis returned from work April 28 to find Carteaux’s body on the blood-soaked, living-room carpet of their West Washington Center Road apartment, dead from a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head, he thought his grief could get no worse.
He was wrong.
“I couldn’t pay this even if I wanted to,” the 25-year-old Gentis said, clutching a document that gives new meaning to “adding insult to injury” — a letter from Archer’s Pointe Apartments demanding he pay $1,467 to clean the blood stains from the couple’s two-bedroom apartment. “It was the worse thing I ever saw, and I can’t get the image out of my head. I haven’t been able to work; I’m on anti-depressants, in counseling, and now I have to deal with this, too.”
Not long after I started looking into this story – the likes of which local Apartment Association Executive Director Jay Scott had never seen – officials with Gene B. Glick Co. of Indianapolis had a change of heart, telling Gentis they would seek payment from Carteaux’s estate instead.
Great. But why did the company, which manages 19,000 apartments in 11 states, do such an apparently unusual, obviously callous thing in the first place?
Citing privacy concerns, Glick officials wouldn’t talk. But, according to a letter from Archer’s Pointe Property Manager Tracy Stolte to Gentis, “any repairs that are beyond normal wear and tear are the financial responsibility of the residents. Although we are extremely sympathetic to your loss, at this time, we cannot take on the financial responsibility of the bill per your lease agreement.”
No doubt cleaning an apartment after a particularly messy suicide does constitute more than “normal wear and tear.” Archer’s Pointe wouldn’t have called in the Illinois-based Aftermath Inc. – “specialists in crime scene & tragedy cleanup” – to remove the usual stains on walls and floors.
But surely the question needs to be asked, especially now that Glick has changed its corporate mind: Perhaps the company had the legal right to do what it did, but was it morally right?
The issue here isn’t – or shouldn’t be, at least – Gentis’ and Carteaux’s sexual orientation. The issue here isn’t homosexuality, but the ability to show compassion to those who mourn.
There’s no evidence the couple’s relationship motivated the apartment owners’ response to Carteaux’s death. Several other gays live at Archer’s Pointe, Gentis said, and he’s never heard any talk of problems with management. “Still, I have to wonder. Would they have done this to a grieving mother whose child died?” he asked.
“I’m just happy this (bill) has been taken care of (for Gentis). Sometimes the Lord’s justice prevails,” said Steve Jones, senior pastor of First Missionary Church on Rudisill Boulevard, which has been supporting Gentis financially since his partner’s death.
Unfortunately, not all of Gentis’ problems can be solved so quickly and easily. Given his still-fragile mental state, he’s not sure when – or if – he’ll be able to return to his sales job at Covenant Filtration Co. He still wonders why a young man so full of life would buy a shotgun on the same day he turned it on himself. He’s hurt Carteaux never hinted at his deadly plan. “But he probably kept quiet because he knew I’d try to stop him.”
And, despite Glick’s about-face and help from the church, Gentis’ financial problems remain. Even though the rent on his one-bedroom apartment at Archer’s Pointe is $100 a month less than the rent on the two-bedroom apartment the two men once shared, Carteaux’s no longer there to help pay the bills.
Not that Carteaux was rich, which Glick may learn should it try to bill his estate. “Brock was 19 and worked at Glamour Shots (a photographic studio),” Gentis said. “He didn’t have any money.”
Gentis doesn’t have much money, either, but at least he doesn’t have a $1,467 bill to pay. And he does have memories: some warm, some unimaginably painful.
Some of that pain could have been avoided.
source:
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/fortway...l/15100309.htm
Man hit with bill in lover's suicide
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