Murder/Attempted Suicide in Tenant Unit

[Robert Lindsley]

Hello BiggerPockets family,

My wife and I own a multifamily apartment building, and we had a terrible tragedy a couple of days ago.
We await the final police report, but there was an apparent murder/attempted suicide in one of the units.

So far we’ve spent $20k in crime-scene cleanup and they still have another day of work to do.  Insurance has said they’re not covering it because it’s a ‘domestic situation’ which is not covered on the insurance.

We’re speaking with a lawyer tomorrow to determine what to do with their possessions and if there is any recourse with the surviving tenant to recover these costs, but we are doubtful he has money to pay us back. 

We’ve also been the lead story on several local news channels (in a metro area) for the past two days — luckily we’re starting to fall off the news cycle, but there were two trucks out front today taking, and later airing, some rather cruel and unflattering footage as we struggle to clean up the mess.

This building previously had somewhat of a ”reputation,” but we have worked extremely hard for over a year to get that successfully turned around, but this is a huge setback and I’m feeling like all the progress we made on our reputation is ruined. The only upside is our tenants are really going to bat for us on social media (which we are avoiding because of the risk of this mess getting even further out of proportion).

Has anybody been through anything like this? I need to make sure our business can survive -but I don’t know how I’ll be able to rent this unit again given the news and social media pile-on (the news were very specific about the apartment #) and I feel people in general will avoid us now. Any words of advice would be really helpful.

Thanks,

Robert.