Photo: Roger Eritja (Getty Images)
Sometimes it pays to be bitten. That’s a saying, right?
According to Gizmodo, a family in California is being given quite a chunk of change after being harassed by bed bugs for months way back in 2012. In their complaint, Liliana Martinez and her husband alleged that their apartment in Inglewood became infested by beg bugs — so much so that they had to throw out all of their furniture and have their place fumigated. But that didn’t do the trick as the bed bugs kept returning. The bed bugs were only removed after numerous complaints to the landlord and after removal of the carpet.
Liliana and her husband finally ended up suing the apartment’s owners, Amusement Six Apartments, for breach of warranty of habitability, emotional distress, negligence, and breach of contract. And guess what? They won $1.6 million.
Gizmodo:
During the infestation, their 3-year-old son Jorge Maravilla Jr. reportedly become so ridden with bites that he developed permanent scars from scratching them, while their 3-month-old daughter was bitten repeatedly on her back as she slept. The shoddy attempts to fix their situation, along with a concurrent cockroach infestation, the family alleged, left them feeling as though they lived in “slum-type living conditions.”
The jury ultimately sided with them, awarding the family exactly $1,593,500 in damages. The young son was personally awarded over $800,000.
It sounds like these folks were pretty damn patient through their entire ordeal as I would have set the place on fire. But hey, at least they weren’t taken over by giant rats like the family below: