Wednesday, October 6, 2004

CAI - Condo Rage, Christopher Durson (Common Ground 10/04)

Community Association Institute

'Condo Rage'
Common Ground, September/October 2004

Christopher Durso

The recent killing of a Chicago-area board secretary--allegedly by a condominium association owner--highlights a troubling phenomenon: Residents who are unstable, violent, or potentially dangerous.
Rita Hohmeier's name was on the eviction papers, so that's who police say Zdzislaw Kuchlewski was waiting for in the parking lot of the Willows Condominiums, in Franklin Park, Illinois, on July 13. Kuchlewski had returned home that Tuesday afternoon to find his belongings piled outside his building. He owed the Willows more than $4,000 in overdue assessments and fees, and in Illinois, condominiums have the option of pursuing an eviction without foreclosing. As the Willows' board secretary, 75-year-old Hohmeier had signed the lawsuit that resulted in the eviction.

Police say Hohmeier was at her sister's funeral when Kuchlewski discovered his eviction. So he sat in his car for several hours, waiting, and when Hohmeier returned home, he confronted her. There was some shouting, witnesses told police, and then Kuchlewski began shooting, killing Hohmeier and wounding her roommate, who was with her. Minutes later he surrendered quietly to police; he was taken in, charged with first-degree murder, and now awaits trial.

Neighbors later told police that Hohmeier was a stickler for rules enforcement, and that she and Kuchlewski quarreled frequently over dues, window cleaning, and other association issues. And that was all it took to shape the story. As one early headline in the Chicago Sun-Times put it: "Man charged as condo feud turns deadly." The Chicago Tribune cut even closer to the bone: "1 dead, 1 hurt in condo rage shooting."

BOILING POINT

Well, why not "condo rage"? At a time when shootings, beatings, and other violence have punctuated traffic accidents, airline flights, Little League games, high-school study hall, and bad days at the office, it makes a sick kind of sense that people would start losing control much closer to home, too--sometimes even at home. Whether condo, HOA, or any other kind of community association rage is a bona fide trend is probably something for social scientists to decide, but what's not debatable is the handful of disturbing cases in the last few years in which board members have been attacked and even killed by residents. Often the outburst is the result of a disagreement over an association policy or procedure.

The worst, most high-profile example of this gruesome phenomenon happened in Arizona four years ago, when a heavily armed man named Richard Glassel showed up at a board meeting of the Ventana Lakes Property Owners Association, in Arizona, from which he'd moved away some months before. Without warning, Glassel opened fire on the table of board members at the front of the room; he killed Esther LaPlante, the board treasurer, and Nila Lynn, who was sitting in the audience, and wounded three others before attendees overpowered him. It came out that during the five years Glassel lived in Ventana Lakes, he'd been a difficult neighbor and resident who clashed with the association regularly. Eventually, Ventana Lakes got a permanent injunction to keep him from harassing the association's landscaping crews. After the shooting, Glassel was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.

Two years later, in Parker, Colorado, Susan Vacek was so convinced the Town & Country Town Homes Association was mishandling her assessment money she set fire to the home of a board member. No one was hurt, but Vacek was convicted of arson and attempted manslaughter and sentenced to time in prison.

More recently, this past March, a 78-year-old board member of an Orange County, California, condominium allegedly was beaten unconscious by an owner whose unauthorized renovation of his unit had minutes before drawn a stop-work notice from the association. Charles Mineo has been charged with attempted murder, elder abuse, and burglary for storming into the Dana Point home of Lucy Deabreu, knocking Deabreu's head against the floor, and trying to strangle her.

And that brings us to July, and the Franklin Park shooting, and the latest cycle of fear. The latest uncertainty. The latest questions: How might this have been prevented? Did these associations push things farther or harder than they should have? Could that sort of thing happen here? And the answer: Probably. Because the truly scary thing is that Ventana Lakes, Town & Country, Dana Point, and now the Willows are merely the visible face of association violence. They're the best-known cases. Meanwhile, for every high-profile association resident who crosses the line, there are many, many more who walk right up to it. Ask any experienced manager, any experienced attorney, and you'll hear stories about the guy at the board meeting who just seemed off, or the woman at the office who was fine until she just snapped. You'll hear about nagging suspicions, near-misses, and lucky breaks; about people who seemed to have fixated on their association or their neighbors as the source of everything that was wrong in their lives, and the challenge of plumbing their threats and innuendos for indicators of violence.

Some of these wild cards are more obvious about it than others. Paul Grucza, CMCA, AMS, PCAM, vice president and national business development officer for SmartStreet and national preisdent of CAI, remembers an association he used to manage in New York State that convened a meeting to discuss a special assessment. In the audience was a resident who was on medication for schizophrenia. During the discussion, this man suddenly jumped out of his seat, pulled out an open pocket knife, and headed straight toward the board president and Grucza. Other residents in attendance restrained him, and no one was hurt, but still, Grucza says, "That was a very frightening experience." The meeting was postponed, and police showed up and took the man to the hospital. It turned out he'd gone off his medication.

At another of Grucza's former client associations, this one in Florida, a new resident tried to run over the board president because "he believed she was singularly responsible for trying to change the rules in the community to not allow motorcycles." Never mind that the prohibition was in place when he moved in, or that he was the only one in the community who owned a motorcycle. At a third community, also in Florida, Grucza remembers an annual meeting at which election results were announced, prompting the losing candidate to cry fraud and physically attack the winner. "He just went nuts on the guy," Grucza says, then adds dryly: "He, too, was restrained."

Michael C. Kim, Esq., a partner with Arnstein & Lehr, in Chicago, also has his share of stories. There was the condominium owner whose drug abuse caused him to become delusional to the point where he thought his neighbors were spying on him, so he disconnected the common electricity and became "somewhat physically intimidating, apart from his bizarre behavior." In another community, there was the grown man who lived with his parents who, in addition to being a Peeping Tom, was prone to loitering around the common areas in a way that wasn't terribly friendly. And in still another association, this one a high-rise, Kim says, there was a manic-depressive alcoholic staying as someone's guest who panhandled residents, stole from them, drove his car through a garage door, and eventually took a dislike to one of the garage attendants. In fact, police caught him when he was en route to the garage to confront the attendant, butcher knife in hand. "Just a very troubled person," Kim says.

Not that these things always get to the point of no return. Judy Farrah, CMCA, LSM, PCAM, for example, has a few stories that ended with relative peace--but still highlight how disquieting it can be to deal with people who seem dangerous. One such person let his dogs swim in the lakes at a community Farrah managed in Las Vegas, in violation of association policy. "He had been kind of threatening to our courtesy patrol," says Farrah, now community manager of Sun City Anthem Community Association, in Henderson, Nevada, "and threatening a little bit to other people." Eventually, the entire board ended up talking to him, "and he backed down pretty quickly with them."

On another occasion, Farrah remembers, a different resident in the same association showed up at a board meeting with a piece of a Christmas decoration that kids in his neighborhood had trashed. The resident had asked the architectural review committee for permission to put up a sign that said, "Trespassers Will Be Shot," which the ARC refused--as did the board. "The guy turned out to be one of those 'Lenny the Enforcer' types," Farrah says, "and he threatened to have his 'boys,' as he called them, patrol the neighborhood and look for these juveniles." Fortunately, Las Vegas has a community police program whose officers are trained in calming volatile situations, and that's what they did. "It was amazing how much Lenny calmed down," Farrah says, chuckling, "when he saw a police car show up and this guy got out."

Indeed, a lot of these stories--the ones where no one gets hurt--can be funny. To a point. "There is an element of oddity and humor--macabre, but nonetheless humor," Grucza says. "But the reality is, this happens more, in my opinion, than anyone even realizes. The animosities that build up, the medical issues that people have, and what they can do to inflict their anger, or misdirected feelings, or lack of being medicated on other people really is scary. And it happens every day, somewhere."

BARK OR BITE?

Some of this is undoubtedly spillover from a society that seems bigger, noisier, and angrier than ever--so much so that it's christened this whole school of violence with a term that references the original modern workplace shooting: "going postal." And, on a certain level, condo rage is likely attributable to the association model itself, which takes the average, unincorporated neighborhood, with its everyday tensions, rivalries, and disagreements, and adds to it an administrative component responsible for, well, a little bit of everything. Board members and managers are expected to mediate neighbor-on-neighbor disputes, deal with oddball behavior, and preserve and protect the community--whatever that means. In doing so, they represent the association and all its perceived excesses and intrusions. They become focal points for dissatisfaction, magnets for blame; for lack of a better term, they're easy targets.

"One of the things that is most difficult about community association management is, in some ways, we're expected to manage people's opinions and their feelings and attitudes," Farrah says. "Even city and county governments don't expect their employees to do that, except maybe for the police." Adds Grucza: "After all these years of doing this, I am convinced that while community living is a wonderful concept, when you bring groups of people together, whatever venue it's going to be,...you always run the risk of bringing in a blending of personalities that sometimes do not match."

The big challenge for community leaders is to sift through that blend of personalities and separate the merely odd, irritating, or aggressive from the truly unstable, dangerous, or violent. It's no small feat, especially given the spectrum of behaviors you see among people in their homes--alcoholism, mental instability, family dysfunction, or just plain human eccentricity. When does someone in that camp cross the line and become a genuine threat? According to James N. Madero, Ph.D., founder and president of Violence Prevention International, in San Diego, there are usually warning signs. (See "Code Red.") "If you follow every homicide that occurs in the workplace," Madero says, "the first day the story always says, 'We knew Bill was going to do it,' or it says, 'Nobody ever expected it.' By day four, they say, 'One day he took the cat and threw it against the window.'"

The same goes for most seemingly impulsive crimes, says Gregory K. Moffatt, Ph.D., executive director of MPS Consultation Services and author of A Violent Heart: Understanding Aggressive Individuals. "Violence is not a disease," Moffatt writes. "It is not something you catch from someone else, like a virus. More likely, it is something that one plants, nurtures, and cultivates. Air rage and road rage are the harvests of fields that have been sown with the seeds of selfishness, hedonism, and thoughtlessness."

Indeed, the FBI discourages focusing on the most sensational violent incidents, because often the greater or more persistent danger is found in other, related behaviors. In a report on workplace violence--probably the closest analogy for association rage--released two years ago, the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime noted: "As the attention to the issue has grown, occupational safety specialists and other analysts have broadly agreed that responding to workplace violence requires attention to more than just an actual physical attack. Homicide and other physical assaults are on a continuum that also includes domestic violence, stalking, threats, harassment, bullying, emotional abuse, intimidation, and other forms of conduct that create anxiety, fear, and a climate of distrust in the workplace."

A tall order, to be sure, since the FBI's continuum seems to span the shadowy whole of human nature. But the point is clear. In many cases of association rage--certainly in the most publicized ones--the outburst doesn't come out of nowhere. Richard Glassel was so abusive, Ventana Lakes got an injunction against him. Zdzislaw Kuchlewski had argued with Rita Hohmeier frequently and publicly enough that neighbors talked to police and reporters about it right after the shooting.

In the end, you have to know people--know the types, know the extremes, know who has the potential to do what. "Focus on the reality of the threat vs. just a sense of discomfort," Kim says. "Just because someone looks big and maybe unfriendly, are they really a threat? Are we reading too much into that?" Adds Jordan I. Shifrin, Esq., a partner with Kovitz Shifrin Nesbit, in Buffalo Grove, Illinois: "There are certain profiles--whether someone's employed, whether they live alone. But you've got to go with your gut a lot of times." For example, it helps to know how a typical community breaks down. "One percent of the people cause 99 percent of the problems," Shifrin says. "Twenty percent are great, and that's your pool of board members and leaders. And 20 percent are the worst people on earth.... [They're] going to complain and criticize, but very few of them will actually do anything about it."

HOW TO DEAL

What if they do? Or, what if you have a strong hunch they might? Then what? "The ultimate question is, when is an association going to be held derelict for not doing something?" Kim says. "Thankfully for my clients, it's never gotten to that point. Because you can imagine in these circumstances, if things had gotten to a bad result and the association was on notice, well, what do you do?"

All you can do is try to protect your community (and yourself) from something that might not even happen. When faced with a person who gives you a bad feeling--the resident who shouts herself raw during a board meeting, the resident who lurks in the mailroom, the resident who sends letter after letter to the management office, the clearly disturbed resident who seems suspicious of her neighbors--you have a few courses of action. Whether you need to nip something in the bud before it grows into something worse or respond decisively to an already ugly situation, these steps are meant to supplement whatever formal security program you have in place.

Stay calm. Losing your temper or overreacting could have the exact opposite effect you're looking for. "No matter how difficult the situation becomes," Grucza says, "remain as calm as possible, because otherwise it will only incite further bad behavior."

Listen and respond. Often, Madero says, people who seem hostile have a specific grievance and simply want to know they're being taken seriously. "Listen to what the problem is," Madero says. "Make certain you hear it, even if you have to restate it back. Even if it's something you can't do anything about, don't be cavalier about it." That also means taking the person seriously enough to be completely frank. Says Grucza: "Try and reason with the person. Try and make them understand that the issues they are trying to talk about may not have a particular place at that meeting or in that community."

Be proactive. When Judy Farrah was faced with the vaguely menacing guy who refused to keep his dogs out of the lake, her board stepped in. Partly that was luck--the man happened to be near the clubhouse when a board planning session let out. But it was also the board's way. "They took the initiative upon themselves to go and talk to this guy," Farrah says. "They were not confrontational. They just said, 'You need to keep the dogs out of the lake, and here is why.'" Crisis averted.

Act quickly. If you've decided someone poses a clear threat to your community and you need to do something, then do it. "Make a quick, decisive determination," Kim says. "Are you going to take direct action against the individual? Is it going to start with a warning? Is it going to progress to a fine? Is it maybe going to escalate to an injunction or lawsuit? Or is it, skip steps one and two and just go to three?" The key is to be flexible, and vary your response according to the situation. For example, Kim says, while the troublesome condo guest who went after the garage attendant with a knife clearly was a case for the police, the threatening resident who thought his neighbors were spying on him called for a less-direct approach--the association filed a lawsuit that resulted in his being forced to sell his unit and move.

Post guards. It's not uncommon for associations to have off-duty police officers patrol their meetings. Sometimes, that can be enough to keep the lid from blowing off--or to respond immediately when it does. In fact, it was an off-duty sheriff's deputy who restrained the enraged losing candidate in the community Grucza used to manage.

Get professional assistance. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to accept that a situation is beyond your immediate expertise or even your control. If your community or management company is big enough, you might have a violence prevention program you can activate. If you're dealing with residents who seem mentally ill, you might try contacting their families or see if there's a county agency that can help. "Obviously, these situations can get expensive," Kim says, "so you should see if there are public services that can be utilized for free or at minimal expense." When Farrah was dealing unsuccessfully with "Lenny the Enforcer," for example, her association eventually realized some things should be left to the police's community division. Says Farrah: "I like being able to bring in an outside agency that has more resources and often faster acting power."

Call the police. When you're talking about dangerous people, the police are the option of first and last resort. Don't be afraid to use them. "If it's specific to the community, if it's affecting the operation of the community," Grucza says, "I'll get involved personally to take care of an issue. If it's a matter of assault, that's a case for the police to deal with."

In the coming months, as Charles Mineo and Zdzislaw Kuchlewski come to trial, "condo rage" will likely get more attention, and while that's not completely fair, neither is it altogether bad. The important thing for community leaders, Grucza says, is to "elevate your awareness"--realize there could be an incident, there could even be violence, and understand that you have to handle it. As much as anyone can understand or predict that kind of hypothetical before it happens. "I don't think there's anything or any mechanism available to totally equip a board member or anybody else to deal with those particular issues," Grucza says. "Because you don't know when they're going to come up."
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Christopher Durso is the editor of Common Ground.

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RESOURCES: Violence Prevention International. www.vpi-prevent.com.

A Violent Heart: Understanding Aggressive Individuals, by Gregory K. Moffatt. Praeger Publishers, $24.95.

Workplace Violence: Issues in Response, by the Critical Incident Response Group, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, FBI Academy. www.fbi.gov/publications/violence.pdf.

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CODE RED

People will surprise you--until you look a little closer. James N. Madero, Ph.D., founder and president of Violence Prevention International, says those prone to violence often fit one or more of these criteria:

Prior history of violence.
Belligerent, argumentative, or challenging.
Depressed, and "maybe having experienced some major setbacks in life."
Possessed of "a really strong belief they are absolutely right in whatever it is they contest."
Unsure grasp on reality--"maybe hearing voices, seeing things."
Reluctant to stay within the legal system to solve problems--for example, inclined to say, "You'll be sorry," instead of "You'll hear from my attorney."
Nursing an emotional feud for a long time.
Suddenly very quiet and seemingly at peace after being visibly upset about something.

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