If you hate all landlords, why rent?
Edgar Moncayo's death is tragic regardless of tenants' views about property owners
The worldwide pandemic has created an even further hostile divide between tenants and landlords. Since 2020, there have been an estimated 989,080 evictions in six states and 31 cities. While some states and grants scrambled to mediate eviction and help both property owners and tenants with lost finances, others just gave up entirely and found that they couldn’t work together to get a resolution.
Still, the idea of a tenant being so furious that he owes rent and pushing his landlord down a set of stairs, cracking his head open and killing him, is beyond evil. Tenants can find another home; that landlord cannot find a new life.
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Why is this coming up? A 23-year-old man (Alex Garces) fatally shoved his 71-year-old landlord Edgar Moncayo down a flight of steps. The murder, which happened on January 12, 2020, resulted in Garces dying from his head hitting the sidewalk.
Note: 72.5% of single-unit rental properties are owned by individuals, while 69.5% of properties with 25 or more units are owned by for-profit businesses.
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At first pleading not guilty and blaming the incident on carrying a mattress out of his front door, reports the New York Post, he later admitted to shoving his landlord. Why was Moncayo there in the first place? The elderly man, who lived with his wife in the basement of the same building and rented out the floors above, confronted Garces about one month of missing rent. Although ABC7 reports that Garces was being evicted, this seems questionable considering the landlord was still trying to collect rent.
And according to ABC7, Moncayo’s grandson Juan Jose Farfan said his grandfather had already reduced the rent from $400 to $200 per month. (The last time I had rent that cheap was 21 years ago in Missouri — $225 for one-bedroom unit. So the fact that the landlord was trying to work with him for a price this cheap is an even wilder spin on the story.)