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Tenants of Illegal Rooming Houses Busted by City Face Bleak Options | St. Louis

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click to enlarge MIKE FITZGERALD Jerry Randall and Darlene Hughes have rented from Dara Daugherty for 11 years. Both are disabled and, Randall says, “ain’t got nowhere to go.”
Lisa Cranford, 53, has no clue where she’ll be living a day from now.
Cranford’s landlord has ordered her out of the cramped and ramshackle apartment she lives in at 4755 Michigan Avenue. But time is running out, and Cranford hasn’t even started looking for a new place to live.
“She gave me until Tuesday,” Cranford said Friday of her landlord, real estate investor Dara Daugherty. “But I don’t know what I can do because I haven’t paid her rent because the police told me not to. With my husband being sick, and me working, I’ve had no time to do anything.”
Cranford and her husband moved into the apartment in Tower Grove East back in August. Last week, Cranford’s husband died from lung and bone cancer — and Cranford also learned from police the apartment building had been condemned years ago, and that Daugherty had been renting it to the couple illegally.
“I didn’t know this place was condemned,” Cranford told an RFT reporter on Friday. “I would never have moved in.”
In a 57-page lawsuit filed last week, the city of St. Louis accused Daugherty and her business partners of running a sprawling real estate scam involving 39 condemned properties in nine neighborhoods. The city accused the group of turning condemned buildings into illegal rooming houses, preying on vulnerable people by taking their cash in exchange for near-uninhabitable spaces.
The lawsuit was filed against Daugherty, Keith Mack, four other people and dozens of LLCs they control.
Daugherty allegedly sought out new tenants in homeless shelters and food pantries, and preyed on the “vulnerable and indigent,” including those suffering mental illness and drug addiction. Daugherty allegedly bragged that she pulled in $40,000 a month from the scheme, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit states that for one property on Virginia Avenue, which Daugherty rented out between 2018 to 2023, the city Building Division issued seven notices of condemnation as well as notices of 159 ordinance violations.Yet Daugherty continued to rent it out room by room, according to the lawsuit.
It remains unclear how many of Daugherty’s tenants have already left her properties, and how many more are in danger of being booted out in the weeks ahead. A visit to five of the condemned buildings named in the lawsuit confirmed that the city’s lawsuit exposed a dangerous and exploitative situation. For the people who’ve relied on the illegal rooming houses for shelter, however, it hasn’t solved it.
click to enlarge MIKE FITZGERALD One of the apartments in Dara Daugherty’s building on Michigan Avenue.
That includes Cranford, on Michigan Avenue. She said she was the only person living there.
At three of the five properties, no one answered the door, though a peek through the windows revealed obvious signs of human habitation, including the presence of dogs, small children’s toys and shoes.
At 4742 South Grand Boulevard, a three-story walk-up, there were at least three occupied apartments, each with running water and electricity, even though the buildings are officially condemned.
On the top floor, married couple Jerry Randall, 62, and Darlene Hughes, 64, said they had been living in the building for 11 years and had not encountered major problems.
“Nah, they ain’t told us to leave,” said Randall, who’s been disabled nearly his entire life because of a childhood accident and receives a monthly $943 Social Security Income check. “A good thing. I ain’t got nowhere to go.”
Money is tight for Randall and Hughes, who, because of poor vision and back problems, is also classified as disabled and receives $943 each month.
On a bitterly cold afternoon, the apartment was warmed by a large electric space heater perched haphazardly on a table and a pile of clothes. The regular heat has been shut off because they couldn’t afford it, he said.
“We don’t got money to pay a gas bill,” Randall said as he took a contemplative drag off a cigarette. “We barely got money to pay the electric bill.”
Randall and Hughes knew Daugherty through her mother.
“We started renting from her mother,” he said. “Her mother died. She took over, then we started renting from her.”
click to enlarge MIKE FITZGERALD Tamara Rosselot describes life in Dara Daugherty’s building on South Grand as “hell.”
One floor below, Tamara Rosselot, 31, shares an apartment with an ex-boyfriend while she tries to get her life together after living sporadically on the streets.
Unemployed for the past eight years, Rosselot said she gets by because “friends help me out.” Her ex pays Daugherty a monthly rent of $600, plus the extra $50 to cover for Rosselot.
One of her top priorities, Rosselot said, is winning custody of her 3-year-son from her mother, who lives in Arnold.
“We’re trying to get him back,” she said.
Last year, with Daugherty’s help, she applied for financial assistance through the federally funded State Assistance For Housing Relief program, or SAFHR, which provided rent and utility aid to tenants hurt by the COVID-19 epidemic. The money never came through, Rosselot said.
As for life in the building, Rosselot described it as “hell.”
Why?
“Because nothing works,” she answered. “I’m trying to look for a place.”
To illustrate her point, she led an RFT writer to the building’s basement, which was strewn with trash, rusty tools and piles of old clothing, which she explained by way of saying, “Me and my ex got into a fight.”
Rosselot pointed to the aging gas-fired furnace, whose pipes were wrapped in thick layers of gray and black duct tape.
“There’s a gas leak,” she said. “Ameren and Spire have already been out here.”
Does she think it’s dangerous to live here?
“Yeah,” she replied.
The same spirit of show-and-tell applied to Cranford.
Although she declined to show an RFT reporter her apartment, Cranford led him to the back of the apartment house, then through a battered metal door with a broken handle.
Cranford gingerly walked up a steep, litter-strewn stairwell to an abandoned open-floor apartment, whose last tenants had thoroughly trashed it before leaving.
As she walked across the room, Cranford recalled how things started off well with Daugherty back in August.
“At first she was real nice,” Cranford said. “She helped me and my husband.”
Cranford never got to sign a lease, though, and looking back, she sees that as a red flag.
“She kept telling me she was going to bring it over,” she said. “This was early on. And I saw it in her hand one day, but she never let me sign it. I kept asking for it and asking for it.”
During their first month, “Everything was fine,” she said. “Then all of a sudden I seen things changing. Her not fixing anything.”
A fearful look crossed Cranford’s face as she contemplated future interactions with Daugherty.
“Why is she not arrested yet?” Cranford said, wincing. “Because she was here yesterday.”
Cranford stared at the bare wooden floor for a long moment, as if pondering her options, none of which at that moment seemed palatable.
“She’s very intimidating,” Cranford said. “She’s mean.”
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Fenton Man Charged in Sword Attack on Roommate

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A warrant is out for a Fenton man’s arrest after he allegedly attacked his roommate with a sword.
Police say that on Sunday, Angelus Scott spoke openly about “slicing his roommate’s head” before he grabbed a sword, raised it up and then swung it down at the roommate.
The roommate grabbed Scott’s hand in time to prevent injury. When police arrived at the scene, they found the weapon used in the assault.
The sword in question was a katana, which is a Japanese sword recognizable for its curved blade.
This isn’t the first time a samurai-style sword has been used to violent effect in St. Louis. In 2018, a man hearing voices slaughtered his ex-boyfriend with a samurai sword. His mother said he suffered from schizoaffective disorder.
As for Scott, 35, the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office was charged yesterday with two felonies, assault first degree and armed criminal action. The warrant for his arrest says he is to be held on $200,000 bond.
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Caught on Video, Sheriff Says He’s Ready to ‘Turn It All Over’ to Deputy

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Video of St. Louis Sheriff Vernon Betts taken by a former deputy suggests that the sheriff has a successor in mind to hand the reins of the department over to, even as Betts is in an increasingly heated campaign for reelection.
“I ain’t here for all this rigmarole,” Betts says in the video while seated behind his desk at the Carnahan Courthouse. “The Lord sent me here to turn this department around and I’m doing the best I can and I think I’ve done a good job. I’ve got about eight months and I’m going to qualify for my fourth pension.”
He goes on, “Right now I can walk up out of here and live happily ever after and forget about all this…and live like a king.”
The sheriff then says his wife has been in Atlanta looking at houses and that the other deputy in the room, Donald Hawkins, is someone Betts has been training “to turn it all over to him.”
Asked about the video, Betts tells the RFT, “My future plans are to win reelection on August 6th by a wide margin and to continue my mission as the top elected law enforcement official to make St. Louis safer and stronger. Serving the people of St. Louis with integrity, honor and professional law enforcement qualifications is a sacred responsibility, and I intend to complete that mission.”
The video of Betts was taken by Barbara Chavers, who retired from the sheriff’s office in 2016 after 24 years of service. Chavers now works security at Schnucks at Grand and Gravois. Betts’ brother Howard works security there, too.
Chavers tells the RFT that she was summoned to Betts’ office last week after Betts’ brother made the sheriff aware that she was supporting Montgomery. It was no secret: Chavers had filmed a Facebook live video in which she said she was supporting Betts’ opponent Alfred Montgomery in the election this fall. “Make the judges safe,” she says in the video, standing in front of a large Montgomery sign on Gravois Avenue. “They need a sheriff who is going to make their courtrooms safe.”
In his office, even as Chavers made clear she was filming him, Betts told Chavers he was “flabbergasted” and “stunned” she was supporting Montgomery.
“I don’t know what I did that would make you go against the preacher man,” he says, referring to himself. He then refers to Montgomery as “ungodly.”
Betts goes on to say that not long ago, he was walking in his neighborhood on St. Louis Avenue near 20th Street when suddenly Montgomery pulled up in his car and, according to Betts, shouted, “You motherfucker, you this, you that. You’re taking my signs down.”
Montgomery tells the RFT that he’s never interacted with Betts outside of candidate forums and neighborhood meetings.
“I don’t think anyone with good sense would do something like that to a sitting sheriff,” Montgomery says.
Montgomery has had campaign signs missing and on at least two occasions has obtained video of people tearing them down. (Chavers notes that the sign that she filmed her original Facebook video in front of is itself now missing.)
One man who lives near Columbus Square says that he recently put out two Montgomery signs, which later went missing. “If they keep taking them, I’ll keep putting them up,” he said.
Betts says he has nothing to do with the missing signs. In the video Chavers filmed in Betts’ office, Betts says that his campaign isn’t in a spot where it needs to resort to tearing down opponents’ signs.
“If you sit here long enough, a man is getting ready to come across the street from City Hall bringing me $500, today,” Betts says. “I’m getting that kind of support. I don’t need to tear down signs.”
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St. Louis to Develop First Citywide Transportation Plan in Decades

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The City of St. Louis is working to develop its first citywide mobility plan in decades, Mayor Tishaura Jones’ office announced Tuesday. This plan seeks to make it easier for everyone — drivers, pedestrians, bikers and public transit users — to safely commute within the city.
The plan will bring together other city projects like the Brickline Greenway, Future64, the MetroLink Green Line, and more, “while establishing new priorities for a safer, more efficient and better-maintained transportation network across the City,” according to the release.
The key elements in the plan will be public engagement, the development of a safety action plan, future infrastructure priorities and transportation network mapping, according to Jones’ office.
The overarching goals are to create a vision for citywide mobility, plan a mixture of short and long-term mobility projects and to develop improved communication tools with the public to receive transportation updates. In recent years, both people who use public transit and cyclists have been outspoken about the difficulties — and dangers — of navigating St. Louis streets, citing both cuts to public transit and traffic violence.
To garner public input and participation for the plan, Jones’ office said there will be community meetings, focus groups and a survey for residents to share their concerns. The city will also be establishing a Community Advisory Committee. Those interested in learning more should check out at tmp-stl.com/
“Everyone deserves to feel safe when getting around St. Louis, whether they’re driving, biking, walking or taking public transit,” Jones said in a news release. “Creating a comprehensive transportation and mobility plan allows us to make intentional and strategic investments so that moving around St. Louis for jobs, education, and entertainment becomes easier, safer and more enjoyable.”
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