Image Credit: ADOBE STOCK
July 03, 2020 - 7:30 AM
Since they agreed to take in new tenants three months ago, Ken Fayter and his wife have been dealing with a chain of frustrating events, punctuated Monday when a man was fatally attacked by a dog at his property. Fayter is ready to do anything in his power to get the tenants out.
“They keep bringing in these street people and I have no idea what they are or who they are and we're not happy about our safety situation,” Fayter says. “We want to get them out of the house, we want them away. They can go wherever they want but we don’t need them here. I told them, ‘at our age, we don’t need this kind of stress.”
Fayter and his wife came home on Monday morning to find their home surrounded by emergency vehicles.
“My wife and I had gone to Denny’s for breakfast and when we came home we had about ten police cars, two ambulances and fire trucks.”
When Fayter knocked on the door of his rental unit, the female occupant denied him entry. He insisted due to the emergency situation and realized how much blood was in the suite.
Ken Fayter says he's been dealing with police visits to his rental unit for the past three months.
Image Credit: FACEBOOK / Ken Fayter
READ MORE: Man killed by pit bull in Kamloops
Fayter says he and his wife don’t feel safe in the home but haven’t been able to evict the tenants. Pandemic restrictions that were previously put in place to prevent evictions kept him from doing so.
Fayter says the couple seemed to be put together during the initial meeting and application process. They signed a month-to-month lease that stated no pets and no subletting, although Fayter believes the owner of the pit bull was living in a room at the time.
“I was outside mowing the lawn and this guy went by with a great big pit bull. I talked to him for a minute or two, pleasantries, and I didn’t even know he was living in the house. We talked about pit bulls and he talked about how his was well-behaved,” Fayter says.
The subletting and dogs within the rental unit were minor compared to some of the other things that have occurred in the three-month span.
“The police have been in and out of here constantly,” Fayter says. “They came by to take away a stolen car that was left, they came by and took away a guy in handcuffs, they’ve come by and taken away a stolen bicycle, they came by because the wife had changed the locks so her husband couldn’t come in so they were here because neighbours called when he tried to get in through windows…. We could make a reality movie out of this.”
A watch commander from the RCMP has not been able to confirm the details around the alleged police presence, but Fayter says it has kept his neighbours on edge.
“Lots of my neighbours spoke about the tenants to me and I’m doing my best to try and alleviate the situation but there’s nothing I could do,” Fayter says. “I live at one end of the house so, for the most part, I have no idea what goes on, but the neighbours across the street informed me that they’ve had traffic in and out of the house all night long and they figure they're drug dealers.”
Fayter, a semi-retired pastor in his 80s, says he feels compassion for the couple but the stress of their presence is weighing too heavy on him.
“He came one night with another man at 2:30 in the morning demanding into where we are... brought in a great big TV and said, ‘Don’t you give this to my wife.’ It was 2:30 in the morning, I was sound asleep so I didn’t think to call the police or call a friend I just let him do what he wanted.”
Oscar Miklos, lawyer and founder of Refresh Law in Burnaby, says the Fayters might have some more luck now since some of those orders have been lifted.
“I’m not a fan of eviction... our goal is to keep people in housing but at the end of the day, you have to take it on a case by case basis and sometimes the most reasonable solution is to end a tenancy,” Miklos says.
According to the notice posted by the provincial government, landlords can now issue a notice to end the tenancy, so long as it is not for late or unpaid rent.
“Often the best way to resolve these situations is not getting into them in the first place. Of course, when you do have a situation like this occur and particularly given the age of these landlords, I can well picture that it’s super frustrating for them and it sounds like they're well-intended people and it sounds like they just took on the wrong tenant,” Miklos says.
He believes that the landlords have strong grounds to successfully terminate the tenancy with a 30-day notice. He recommends a vigorous vetting system prior to signing on a tenant or suggests that people sign on Landlord B.C. or with a rental property management company.
Fayter has been told by the tenants that they will dispute any action taken against them, but Fayter plans to do it anyway.
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