A jury in Baltimore this week held a landlord and a property management company liable for $21.5 million in damages after their employee at a rooming house brutally assaulted a man and woman, set them on fire and left them for dead.
The employee, Jason Dean Billingsley, 34, pleaded guilty and is serving life in prison. Less than a year before the assaults, he’d been released from prison after convictions for violent crimes in 2009, 2011 and 2015, including a first-degree sex offense.
The lawsuit against landlord Property Pals and property management company Eden’s Homes accused them of hiring Billingsley to help with upkeep of the rooming house without checking his background.
“I’m not surprised by the ruling,” Malcolm Ruff, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said at a news conference after the jury’s decision Tuesday. “This was a depraved act, but it was absolutely foreseeable. It was absolutely predictable. And all it took was a very, very quick search through the Maryland judiciary case search database to discover that this man had no business and was completely unfit to work in this atmosphere, in somebody’s private home.”
Melody Miles Haynes, a lawyer for Property Pals and Eden’s Homes, said by email that they would appeal the verdict but declined to comment further. No attorney was listed on a case docket for Billingsley, who was also named as a defendant in the civil case.
The assaults, which occurred one evening in September 2023, began as the plaintiffs, April Hurley and Jonte Gilmore, were sleeping in a unit Hurley was renting in the rooming house on Edmondson Avenue in Baltimore, according to the lawsuit.
Hurley heard a man, later identified as Billingsley, shout from the top of a staircase leading to the next floor: “Maintenance. You have a flood in the kitchen.” As Hurley arrived at the top of the steps, Billingsley grabbed her hair, threw her to the floor and hit her in the face with a gun, the lawsuit said. He then wrapped duct tape around her ankles and head.
Billingsley woke Gilmore, asked him, “Where that money at?” and threatened to rape Hurley if he “tried anything stupid,” the lawsuit said. Then Billingsley handcuffed Gilmore and duct taped his hands and face. Soon, Billingsley tortured and sexually assaulted Hurley and attempted to strangle her. As she tried to fight him off, he cut her throat with a serrated knife, the lawsuit said.
Believing Hurley to be dead, Billingsley forced Gilmore into a closet, doused them and the apartment with gasoline and set them on fire. Hurley tried to pat out the fire on her body with her hands, and she and Gilmore escaped out of a window, the lawsuit said.
A few days after the assaults, Billingsley murdered another woman, Pava LaPere, a crime for which he also pleaded guilty. LaPere, a tech CEO who co-founded EcoMap Technologies, was on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for social impact the year of her death.
Hurley said at Tuesday’s news conference that pursuing the civil case was “extremely hard.” Recounting that evening, “the flashbacks, viewing the pictures of my injuries, of Jonte’s injuries, it brought back horrible memories,” she said.
But, she said, she was gratified by the verdict. “No amount of money could possibly change what happened, but it definitely sends a message to the property management company, the landlord, and other landlords and property management companies,” she said, “to let them know that they should follow the standards that are in place and properly vet people that will be around tenants in their homes.”
The property is a multiunit brick rowhouse in West Baltimore, part of what has been termed the “Black Butterfly,” a set of poor, predominantly Black neighborhoods that spread to the east and west of the city’s center.
“I think it had a lot to do with where the rooming house was located, in the Black Butterfly on the other side of MLK,” Ruff said, “where these folks who were making a profit from renovating houses and splitting them up into individual rooms simply overlooked, ignored, willfully and deliberately, their duty to April.”
The Baltimore Banner reported that Curtis Haynes, owner of Eden’s Homes and co-owner of Property Pals, testified that he met Billingsley at a bar and let him live without paying rent in a different apartment. Haynes testified that he paid Billingsley to cut the grass and do other maintenance jobs but did not check his background.
“To cut the grass, no,” Haynes testified, according to the Banner.
The Baltimore City Circuit Court jury awarded Hurley $32,927 in past medical expenses and $943,000 in future medical expenses. Gilmore was awarded $67,514 in past medical expenses and $506,000 in future medical expenses. Each was also awarded $5 million in noneconomic damages and $5 million in punitive damages.
When asked at the news conference whether the companies had insurance or some other means to pay the damages, Ruff said it was too early to tell.
“We are actively working on ensuring that we recover as much of this judgment as we possibly can,” he said, “and we will not rest until we get every single penny that is owed to Ms. Hurley and Mr. Gilmore.”
The post Jury awards $21.5M in brutal Baltimore assault case appeared first on Washington Post.
