Warnings (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

MrBallen (0:00)

Today, I'm going to tell you four stories about people who thought they had a handle on the situation they were in, but they would find out way too late that they'd completely misjudge things.

But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark & Mysterious Deliberate in Story format, then you've come to the right place, because that's all we do, and we upload two, three, even four times every week. So if that's of interest to you, please tell the follow button that you have a really, really important secret to share with them, and then lean in really close to their ear, and at the last second, just turn and sneeze directly on their face. Okay, let's get into our first story, called The Porch Problem. The Porch Problem The Porch Problem The Porch Problem The Porch Problem The Porch Problem The Porch Problem The Porch Problem The Porch Problem The Porch Problem One afternoon in August of 2012, a woman named Carlotta Robinson sat behind her desk at her condo complex's main office in Dallas, Texas. And as she was sitting there, she was listening to an elderly tenant, who was seated across from her, rant about his upstairs neighbors. Carlotta was the property manager and president of the Homeowners Association for this complex, which was called Sable Ridge. And she actually also lived in this complex herself. So basically every hour of her day was spent wrapped up in the various issues and projects that came up here. And today, that involved resolving a dispute between two neighbors. The man in front of her was a 75-year-old condo owner named Chung Kim. He lived in a ground-floor unit, and he felt like the couple that lived right above him were ruining his life. They had five kids and a dog, so it was incredibly noisy all the time, but the worst part was the dog upstairs would go to the bathroom on their porch, and then the couple would hose it off, so all the waste would run down onto Chung's porch. Now Chung said he'd already told them repeatedly to stop, but since they hadn't, he was now here asking the HOA to do something about it.

So, Carlotta knew that Chung had a habit of fighting with basically all of his neighbors, so she took what he was saying with a grain of salt. But Chung and his wife had owned their condo at Sable Ridge for more than six years, while this upstairs couple that they were so upset about, they had just moved in last year, and they were also renting, and so in terms of the hierarchy of sort of importance to Sable Ridge and tenure, Chung was higher on that list. And you know, if what Chung was saying was true, then what the couple was doing was totally unhygienic and did need to stop. So Carlotta told Chung she would speak to the couple and inform the HOA, and she was sure they could all figure this out. However, the issue did not get resolved at all, even though Carlotta and the HOA both tried to mediate it. Over the next few months, the disagreement between Chung and his neighbors only escalated, with both sides constantly lobbing complaints with the HOA about one another. It was like this ongoing drama that just had no end in sight. According to Chung, his neighbors upstairs had continued to be noisy and continued to wash their dog's waste onto his porch, and he'd even contacted the police and the health department about it, and still nothing had been done. But the couple upstairs, I mean, they had complaints of their own. They said Chung was harassing them, and he kept cutting some of their condo's cable wires to mess with them, or at least they were pretty sure it was him doing that. And Carlotta, I mean, she kept trying to help. She talked to both sides, and she emailed Sable Ridge's board of directors and its management company repeatedly, not just once, but all the time, trying to figure out what to do here, asking for help on how to resolve this thing.

And there was a lot of back and forth, but no one could actually figure out any real solution. And the neighbors, Chung and the upstairs neighbors, they just kept going at it. Until finally, when Carlotta was just at her wits end with this whole thing, she actually reached out to the owner of the upstairs unit that the couple was renting from. So Sable Ridge managed the property. This is the actual owner of that unit that the couple was renting from. She asked the owner, would you please just evict this couple because it's just causing all these issues here? And the owner said, sure, I will. Fast forward to February 4th, 2013 This is now about six months after the initial complaints began between Chung and the upstairs neighbors. And at about 8 a.m. on this day, Carlotta, she's bedraggled. She walks back inside of her apartment. She shuts the door behind her and just collapses on the couch. She's already just so wiped, already so annoyed about how the day is going. Because today, that morning, she was already dealing with more complaints from the upstairs neighbor about Chung. So the upstairs neighbors, that couple, they had been told they were being evicted, but they had not actually been evicted yet. It had been six months now, and they're still just here, and the drama is still unfolding between Chung and the neighbors. It was just still going the same way it had been. But Carlotta knew that today, finally, like within the hour, hopefully, this couple was finally actually going to leave, and this whole thing was just going to finally be done. And so she's sitting on the couch, and she's just over it when she hears somebody suddenly start pounding on her door. It startles her, she jumps up, she runs to the door, she opens it up. It's not Chung, it's not the upstairs couple, it's this other resident of the Sable Ridge apartment complex, and he's ashen-faced, he looks completely terrified, and he begins to tell Carlotta this story of what's just happened, something he just saw, something he just witnessed, and he can't even believe it. And after Carlotta hears this, like her heart's racing, she's just as scared, and she runs, grabs the phone, and calls the police. It would turn out basically everybody knew this couple was about to be evicted. From the time they were notified six months earlier all the way to now, it was like all the people in the know were well aware of this was happening. You know, Sable Ridge, Carlotta, the couple, lots of people inside of the actual complex. This was sort of a known thing. It was just working its way towards the day they finally actually left. Everybody knew.