Advice Needed - New Tenant with Eviction Found on Record!

[Logan M Walters]

Hello, and thanks for taking the time to read my post. I put myself in an awkward situation now involving an ethical dilemma. I'm working on getting my 2nd rental property under lease. I had an interested tenant come see the property. This tenant's long term girlfriend (8yrs) is moving from California once they find a place. We are in Arkansas. So, everything checked out from tenant references to income requirements to credit and the woman's background check when vetting these tenants. The only holdup due to the holidays was getting the background report for the guy from Cozy.co. So, since I got all glowing recommendations from references and everything looked clean, I told these people they were approved contingent upon no surprises coming when I received his background check back. I told them explicitly I'm looking for real estate related background problems such as foreclosures or evictions. So, we proceeded and I collected the security deposit and scheduled the lease signing for yesterday afternoon. About an hour before signing, I receive the background check for the guy and there is an eviction on his record from 2019. I immediately put on hold the lease signing to investigate further. Now, I have the girlfriend and daughter in town from CA. Their story about the eviction is that they were being harassed to leave their residence associated with the eviction because the mobile home park was being sold and the owner wanted renters out. She explained the extent of harassment and it does sound like a bad situation. I called the reference they provided for that property and the person told me that she left the company because of how poorly they were treating tenants and the things they wanted her to do to try to remove tenants from the rented units. Assuming this isn't some fake reference and I'm getting played, it seems like their story checks out and they may have been just ignorant in a bad situation and didn't understand the extent of what the court hearing they attended meant for their record. I'm going to call the courthouse to see what the verdict was on the hearing this morning. I don't expect to find that it was overturned like the tenant claims. 

Now I'm in the position of whether or not to rent to these people. They seem like good people, but like any landlord, I'm interested in getting paid, having a tenant that takes care of my property, and not having to formally evict a tenant during COVID, or otherwise. Further, I know I made the mistake of taking the word of a tenant before completing the background check due to their urgency to move/reunite their family. Ethically, I'm torn because the tenant says they did not know they were possibly not approved before this came up and now I've caused them to spend the money to get here and arrange other plans for moving from far away. 

I guess the advice I need is 2 fold: Do I rent to a tenant with an eviction on record in this situation? Or, do I follow the logical answer which is to send them home and find another tenant because they lied on their application that they do not have any evictions? My gut is telling me that they tried to hide this from me during the application process and I need to send them on their way. 

Sorry for the long post. I tried to draw the picture as concisely as possible. Thank you for reading and the feedback in advance!