Somerville's house of horrors: Tenants forced to live with rotting corpse for weeks

SOMERVILLE – The residents of a dilapidated rooming house where a bed bug infestation has raged for at least five years recently had to endure another indignity: living with the stench of rotting flesh of a tenant who died in his room as long as four weeks ago.

The decomposing, fly-covered corpse was found Monday by police — but only several weeks after at least one tenant had complained about the smell to the landlord and to state officials, raising questions about the regulation of rooming houses and how the state Department of Community Affairs handles tenant complaints.

And even days after the body of the 52-year-old resident was carted away by authorities, the landlord still had not thoroughly cleaned the room, a tenant said this week, letting the rotten smell linger in the three-story Victorian house.

The body find comes after a February report by MyCentralJersey.com that revealed an ongoing bed bug infestation and ramshackle conditions at 63 West End Ave. dating back five years.

Shortly after the report, the DCA, which inspects and licenses rooming and boarding houses, visited the home and fined owner Rajinder Jassil $1,000 and ordered state and county welfare agencies not to place more clients at that address until all of the violations were abated.

"It smelled like somebody had boiled a million eggs and let them rot and then burned them," said a tenant, one of 10, who asked that her name not be used because she is afraid other property owners may blacklist her for speaking out against her landlord.

"I was vomiting," she said. "When you came out of the shower, you smelled like you showered in it."

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The tenant, who lives on a different floor than where the body was found, said she complained to Jassil, who merely sprayed the house with Lysol.

The tenant said she then called the DCA about a week before Easter at 609-633-6251, which is the number for the agency's Bureau of Rooming and Boarding House Standards' code enforcement office.

"I told the woman on the phone that the problem is — this can't wait for the inspection worker to come out on the scheduled date. Someone needs to come out here right away," she said. "But nobody ever got back to me."

The tenant's plea for help appears to have been lost by state workers.

A spokesperson for the DCA this week claimed that it was the DCA field evaluator on Monday "who first discovered and acted upon an offensive odor."

Asked to respond to the tenant's claim that she had called the DCA weeks earlier, Emike Omogbai said: "There is no indication DCA received complaints about an offensive odor prior to inspection."

It is not clear what actions, if any, the DCA will take against the landlord following Monday's visit because the inspector had not filed her report, Omogbai said Thursday.

Jassil, a Branchburg resident who also owns two rooming houses in New Brunswick, did not respond to several calls for comment this week.

It is not clear how long the body had been in the room. Jassil told police that he had last spoken with that tenant about two weeks earlier, but the resident who spoke with MyCentralJersey.com said the smell had been permeating the house for much longer than that.

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The tenant who complained said she and others in the home had convinced themselves that the smell was related to the sewer because the landlord had recently attempted to fix one of the bathrooms. The deceased resident had been a man who rarely interacted with others and stayed in his room, so nobody suspected that he may have died, she said. Police said they had not been able to contact his relatives.

Rooming and boarding houses are often home to struggling residents trying to escape homelessness. Rooming houses, like this one, often lack kitchen facilities and have shared bathrooms.

Two of the tenants at this rooming house were placed there by the Somerset County Board of Social Services, which has 26 clients placed in rooming houses throughout the county.

Social Services Director Dominic Crisall said Thursday that the county has stopped placing residents at the West End rooming house, but the state has not ordered the county to remove residents already there.

"It's a standard operation for us to try and assist people to locate a place to live," Crisall said, although options are limited.

"I just want out of here," the tenant said. "They keep telling me, 'we can only put you in a rooming house.' But this is why I did not want to come to a rooming house."

Staff Writer Sergio Bichao: 908-243-6615; sbichao@mycentraljersey.com