Bizarre account of S.F. eviction battle Landlords accused of stalking, theft, conspiracy in S.F.

744-746 Clementina Street is photographed April 26, 2008 in downtown San Francisco, Calif. The building is the site where landlords allegedly terrorized their tenants. Lacy Atkins / San Francisco Chronicle 744-746 Clementina Street is photographed April 26, 2008 in downtown San Francisco, Calif. The building is the site where landlords allegedly terrorized their tenants. Lacy Atkins / San Francisco Chronicle Photo: Lacy Atkins, The Chronicle Photo: Lacy Atkins, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Bizarre account of S.F. eviction battle 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

One day in August 2006, Nicole Macy met with a San Francisco building official to talk about the damage that a small fire had caused to the South of Market apartment building she and her husband owned. She also mentioned she wanted to get rid of a stubborn tenant.

Which one of the now-exposed ceiling beams in the fire-damaged unit, Macy asked, would need to be cut to make the building so dangerous that the city would red-tag it as uninhabitable?

"That would be illegal," Inspector David Herring replied, according to a court filing reviewed by The Chronicle. Herring would never tell someone how to make a building unsafe, he later recounted to authorities. Macy was not too pleased at the inspector's response, he said.

San Francisco prosecutors now say that Macy and her husband, Kip Macy, did have the beams cut supporting the floor of that pesky renter, who had managed to fight off eviction. It was just one salvo in a war of terror that prosecutors say the Palo Alto couple waged against their renters at 744-746 Clementina St. that also included cutting holes in the floor, falsely reporting the troublesome tenant to police as a squatter, and concocting e-mails in his name to an attorney for the landlords, threatening to dismember her children.

Last week, the Macys' alleged tactics landed them in criminal court. Kip Macy, a 33-year-old software developer who has developed anti-hacking programs, and Nicole Macy, 32, a real estate agent whose office is in the Sunset District, were both charged with multiple felony counts of burglary, theft, conspiracy and stalking. They declined to be interviewed for this story.

A knock at the door

Scott Morrow's nightmare, as recounted in a 61-page affidavit that prosecutors filed in support of the charges against the Macys, began not long after the couple showed up in June 2005 at the apartment where he had lived for six years. They introduced themselves as having just bought the six-unit building with a plan to live downstairs.

The Macys were cordial, even when they soon moved to evict Morrow and the tenants of four other units under the Ellis Act, a state law that lets landlords remove tenants to let family members move in. Most of the tenants would have to leave within 60 days, but because he was disabled - suffering chronic, debilitating migraine headaches - Morrow got a one-year reprieve.

In July 2005, the same month the Macys moved in and started eviction efforts, Nicole Macy called Morrow. She asked him if he hated her because of the plan to kick him out, he later told prosecutors. They chatted, and she seemed amiable enough, he said.

Not long after that, however, somebody stomped loudly on the floor of the apartment above Morrow, the one the Macys were using as an office. His electric power was cut in the middle of the afternoon. It lasted just five minutes, so Morrow didn't think much of it.

Building trouble

That November, however, things deteriorated rapidly. Morrow complained to the city about noise and dust from crews working on the vacant apartment below, prompting inspectors to issue a citation against the Macys for having work done without permits.

Kip Macy got so mad, Morrow told prosecutors, that he jumped up and down in the upstairs unit with sufficient force that Morrow's ceiling paint started to crack. Nicole Macy shouted his name from the backyard and tossed pebbles against his window. Loud music blared for six hours.

At 5 a.m. the next day, Morrow said, the music and stomping started again. An hour later, Kip Macy knocked at Morrow's door and asked, "How's it going, Scott?"

Later that morning, Morrow found the new work permit stuffed through his door. Written on it was, "Scott get lost! Get a job!" according to investigators.

Over the next few months, Morrow's water was shut off repeatedly without notice. One time, it happened while Morrow was in the shower.

In December, the Macys moved out, but they made it clear to Morrow they were still thinking about him. Investigators say that a few days after his shower water was cut off, in January 2006, he got a note from Nicole Macy asking how he was doing. "If you come out," she wrote, "I have cinabons from IKEA. Nicole."

Electronic warfare

In March 2006, Morrow was notified that the Macys wanted to sell. The building did go on the market as a tenancy-in-common, with Nicole Macy as the agent. Then the case took a menacing turn.

Kip Macy, prosecutors believe, turned his software engineering skills against Morrow.

Someone started generating e-mail, using accounts under Morrow's name, to attorneys in his eviction case. Morrow later told prosecutors he didn't even have an e-mail address.

The first e-mails went to Morrow's own lawyers in July 2006, the same month that marked the end of the year's reprieve. There was going to be a fight about the eviction in court.

One e-mail purportedly from Morrow told the lawyer that he had been a "disaster and a f- up." The next day, the same lawyer got another message: "You are no longer my counsel. Get lost. Scott."

When a court ruled in Morrow's favor in the eviction case, a lawyer at the firm representing the Macys got an e-mail purportedly from the tenant that read, "One day you are going to come home to the Victorian house ... and find (your three children) missing. Then each day a package will arrive with a piece of them. You are f- with the wrong person."

J. Scott Weaver, Morrow's current lawyer, said the messages prompted the lawyer to obtain a restraining order. When Morrow found out, the attorney said, "he was horrified. Absolutely horrified."

A rocky relationship

On Aug. 21, 2006, Nicole Macy appeared in the backyard at Clementina Street and shouted up to Morrow, "I want you out of my building!" he told prosecutors. She was spotted by a friend of Morrow's who photographed her carrying a rock, and Morrow heard a large crashing sound in the back of his unit. A few minutes later, the power went off.

Later that day, Nicole Macy called police and reported that a homeless person was living in the building and had threatened her, police dispatch records show. An officer soon showed up. When Morrow opened his door, the officer rushed in with gun drawn and ordered Morrow and a friend to the floor.

Morrow convinced the officer he was a tenant, and Macy conceded that she knew him, Morrow told investigators. But Macy also told the officer about a small fire that had damaged the unit below Morrow's a few days before. Morrow told prosecutors that after a night celebrating his victory in staving off eviction, he had come home and found the unit below his on fire. The fire was quickly put out.

The officer told Morrow that the building wasn't safe and that he would have to leave. "Watch your backs," the officer told Morrow and his friend.

A strange conversation

Nicole Macy proceeded to call a city inspector to the building and ask him to rule that Morrow's unit was not habitable because of the fire. The inspector concluded the structure was unsafe and issued a violation notice. Not satisfied with that, Nicole Macy showed up at the Department of Building Inspection, asking building Inspector Herring to have the Clementina Street structure condemned so she could get rid of Morrow.

Herring replied that another inspector had already checked the structure and would have red-tagged the building if needed. Besides, he said, he understood the fire to be minor and that none of the ceiling joists had been damaged.

"Nicole Macy replied by asking what beams she would need to cut to make the apartment building structurally unsafe so the inspector would red tag (it)," according to the prosecution's affidavit.

Rebuffed, prosecutors say, the Macys went ahead with their plan. First they told Morrow the building had been condemned. Then in September, he started to hear rumbling noises from below.

One Saturday, he discovered a 1-by-2-foot hole had been cut in his living room floor.

Soon the Macys were at his door. When Morrow protested, Kip Macy replied, "I'm afraid you didn't inherit the building," the affidavit said.

The contractor the Macys had hired, Ricardo Cartagena, later told prosecutors that Kip Macy had asked him to cut out walls in the first-floor unit. Cartagena protested that it could cause the upper unit to collapse. "Wouldn't it be a shame if it collapsed," Kip Macy replied, Cartagena said.

Crews did cut wedges into the floor beams, prosecutors said, which Morrow discovered when he looked through the hole in his floor. When he called building officials, Nicole Macy told inspectors that it was all because of a misunderstanding with the Spanish-speaking crew she had hired, the prosecution affidavit said.

Then she pressed for building officials to condemn the structure, but inspectors decided instead to declare just Morrow's living room uninhabitable. City crews shored it up at a cost of $8,000. The Macys have yet to pay the bill.

As the Macys' apparent financial problems mushroomed and the plan to sell the building for tenancies-in-common was put on hold, Nicole Macy sent Herring an e-mail in last April that prosecutors believe better describes herself.

She accused him of an "unhealthy obsession" with the building and its owner. The building was nicely maintained but was the target of endless code violations, she complained.

The whole thing was an effort to "assert control over a young female owner," she said. "Your obsessive, compulsive, bizarre, and downright vindictive behavior is a source of utmost and ongoing distress."