‘It was a nightmare’: 51 family members file lawsuit over toxic mold in JBLM housing units
May 12, 2021, 8:43 AM | Updated: May 14, 2021, 9:07 am
A lawsuit was filed in Pierce County Superior Court this week over toxic mold in JBLM housing units. (AP Photo/File)
(AP Photo/File)
A total of 51 plaintiffs across 15 families who lived at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) filed a lawsuit in Pierce County this week, citing negligence on the part of the company that runs housing on the base after toxic mold was discovered in several units.
The forgotten early history of Joint Base Lewis-McChord
Melissa Godoy — who lived in the base’s housing with her family for a decade — described how her family experienced frequent lung, sinus, and ear infections, as well as skin rashes.
“It was month after month of constant antibiotics, and the doctors had no idea what was wrong with us,” she told KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross. “Pretty soon, they stop treating us because we’d cycled through every kind of antibiotic there is and the infections weren’t going away — it was a nightmare.”
Kelsey White also lived on the base, moving into a JBLM housing unit with her family while pregnant with her first son. Up until that point, it was “a by-the-book, textbook pregnancy.” Her unborn son almost immediately began to experience problems after moving onto the base.
“When we first moved into the housing, his kidneys stopped growing in the womb, and later on after we brought him home from the hospital, his kidney then begin to die,” she described. “By six months old, he was in kidney failure.”
White later had a second son while living in the house, who began experiencing febrile seizures right after he was born.
After investigating the house, her family made a startling discovery.
30 families say mold in JBLM housing is making them sick
“We pulled out our dishwasher and there was mold all in our air conditioning vents, all behind the dishwasher, in the baseboards — it was everywhere,” she said.
Despite that, Lincoln Military Housing — the private company that manages JBLM’s housing units — claimed that there wasn’t actually mold at all.
“It was a legit brick wall,” Godoy said. “There was no advocacy, no representation, no resolution process, nothing we could do to help ourselves. We just either had to sit there and be sick or leave.”
Today, White and Godoy say that the company is still placing families in the affected homes.
Moving forward, they say they have “an amazing amount of evidence” for their lawsuit, including samples of the mold, chest X-Rays showing the asbestos in their lungs, and more. The case is expected to go to trial in Pierce County Superior Court in May of 2022.
Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.
-
Tune in to KIRO Newsradio weekdays at 5am for Dave Ross on Seattle's Morning News.
