Lead poisoning lawsuits filed against Manchester landlords
Manchester – The trouble started in the summer, not long before Arbay Osman’s second birthday. The tantrums. The violence. The incessant crying.
Arbay was lashing out. In the hospital, she yelled and spit at the nurses who tried to help her. At home, she bit the hand her mother extended for her to hold.
It might have been a case of the terrible twos. Arbay’s parents, however, say something more insidious has poisoned their daughter’s mind.
Arbay has lead in her blood. Her levels reached a critical height in August, prompting her immediate hospitalization and a state inspection of the Lake Avenue apartment building that her family and five others had been calling home. Additional blood tests found 19 other children there, all Somali refugees, had been poisoned.
Today, Arbay’s parents are seeking compensation. The family is suing the property owners, a husband and wife who live in California, as well as the management company the couple hired to oversee the building. They’re also suing the owners of another inner-city residence, claiming that building, too, is tainted by lead paint.
One matter, however, cannot be settled in court. That is, What will become of Arbay? Lead poisoning can lead to brain damage, but at 2 years old, Arbay may be too young for the effects to be fully evident.
Waiting game
For now, her parents can only wait and worry.
“We are really angry, and we don’t know who to blame,” said her father, Mohamed Mohamed, a 27-year-old Somali refugee who came to New Hampshire two years ago.
“Should we blame the landlord? Should we blame the resettlement agencies? We don’t know.”
Refugee children resettling in New Hampshire are at a high risk for lead poisoning. Many are anemic or suffer from nutritional deficiencies that weaken the body’s resistance to lead.
In Manchester, 228 patients were treated for lead poisoning in fiscal 2005 and 2006, according to the city’s public health department. Eighty nine of those patients, or close to 40 percent, were refugees, a disproportionate sum considering the city’s modest refugee population.
Upon a family’s arrival in the U.S., resettlement agencies try educating refugees about lead poisoning hazards. The concept, however, is not a simple one to convey. Most Somali Bantu refugees are not literate in any language.
“The difficulty is, you cannot taste lead, you cannot see lead, you cannot smell lead,” said Ann Dancy, who runs the resettlement program at Lutheran Social Services in Concord. “It’s kind of like, how do you really explain something you can’t point to and say, ‘This is lead?’”
Unaware of danger
Lutheran Social Services conducted a lead screening in fall 2004 when it helped Mohamed move into his first apartment in Concord, Dancy said. Mohamed, however, said he does not recall receiving any instruction on the dangers of lead.
“They did not tell me anything. Even if they said something, I don’t know what they were talking about,” he said.
At the time, Mohamed was working as a gardener at a nursery in Loudon. He didn’t make much money. With a monthly rent of $800, the family could not afford to stay in Concord, he said.
In October 2005, Mohamed moved his family into a $650-a-month triple decker on Lake Avenue. The building was an old one; assessment records date it back to 1910. Its walls were dirty and pencil scratched.
Mohamed and his wife, Maryan Muse, said they noted the peeling paint on the apartment walls. Muse, 25, said she saw Arbay eating paint chips but claimed she did not understand the risk that posed.
“At first, I didn’t know that was poison,” Muse said through an interpreter. Neither parent speaks English.
Tested positive
Healthy children have no lead in their blood. When tested in February 2006, four months after moving to Manchester, Arbay had a level of 19 micrograms per deciliter of blood, an amount the state classifies as “elevated” but non-emergent.
Arbay’s parents did not schedule a follow-up blood test. In the ensuing months, they said, they started to notice changes in Arbay’s behavior. That was when the crying and tantrums seemed to bloom beyond control.
Muse, who had been running a home daycare service for refugee children, said she became so concerned that in June she quit working and redirected all her attention onto Arbay.
By the time of Arbay’s next blood test in August, her level had soared to 59 — a dangerous sum, according to the family’s attorney, Chris Seufert.
“Almost death,” he described it.
No one can say for certain just where Arbay was poisoned. However, state inspectors did find lead contamination inside the Lake Avenue building and in the soil around the property. The owners, Wen and Lepa Lin, of California, were still working to complete the state-ordered remediation last week.
Wen Lin said he wasn’t aware of any lead hazards on the property until the refugee children tested positive in August. The Lins bought the six-unit apartment building in March 2005. A local management company, Property Services LLC, oversees the building on their behalf.
“I sympathize with the parents,” Lin said in a recent interview, “but we have no idea where this child got poisoned. It could be from our building, or it could be from the sand outside. Or it could be from the previous building they were living in. There are a lot of unknowns.”
Suit filed
The family’s lawsuit — filed on behalf of Arbay and her 5-year-old sister, Dhahiro, whose lead levels were elevated but less severe — claims the Lins and Property Services failed to inspect and repair the building, nor did they warn the family of potential hazards. Tom Morgan, the property manager at Property Services, decined to comment for this story.
Mohamed is also suing Rene and Carmen Denis, of Manchester, who own a rental unit at 236 Grove St. The suit claims Mohamed and his children regularly visited friends who lived in that building, which the family says was tainted by chipped and peeling lead paint. The couple’s attorney, Gary Casinghino, also declined comment.
Arbay has been hospitalized three times since the summer. Doctors used drugs to to purge the lead from her bloodsteam, a process called chelation. Her lead levels are down now, but still elevated.
The family is now living in an apartment on Silver Street. Worried their daughter could be re-exposed to lead, Mohamed and his wife keep Arbay inside the apartment most of the time. When they run errands, one parent keeps Arbay company inside the car.
“We have to pay very close attention every step of her life,” Mohamed said. “We have to go with her to the bathroom, to bed. Everywhere we go, we have to keep her very close to us.”
Long-term issues
Most children with lead poisoning are asympomatic, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services. In time, a child may show signs of a learning disability. Those effects may not be apparent until a child’s 9th or 10th birthday.
“It has tremendous long-term consequences, but they’re subtle,” said Dr. Steven Paris, medical director at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Manchester. “It isn’t that you’re going to have a brilliant person become retarded. But if you were going to have an IQ of 120 and you end up at 100, your potential as an individual is affected. That’s the kind of insidious thing lead is.”
Mohamed said he fears his children will struggle in school. It would be a cruel twist of fate, and a challenge to the better life he hoped his family would find in the U.S.
“I was not lucky enough to get educated,” Mohamed said. “So I was hoping my children would get an education. The problem is now they are in this situation.”