The residents' pro bono attorney, Cathy Lively of Lake Worth, asked Cox if he thought residents could live a normal life with half or no power in their trailers.
"I don't believe they've ever lived a normal life, to tell you the truth," Cox responded.
Eric Alan Barton
"Drug house closed," a neighbor spray painted on his trailer when Roger McFayden packed up.
Eric Alan Barton
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"Why is that?"
"Because they do bizarre things," the landlord explained.
Cox claimed that if he made the repairs to the electrical lines, he'd have to raise rates to pay for it. "The poor residents who I've been helping with low rent all these years wouldn't be better off in the long run," he said.
The judge asked Cox several times if he knew how many tenants were without power or sewer service. Cox said he hadn't taken a survey. He had left flyers on the residents' doors after the storm, but only a few returned them, he claimed. "I have no idea," Cox insisted. "As far as I know they all have power." But pressed further, Cox admitted that at least one trailer was without power entirely and several others had only partial power. In truth, 15 tenants have joined the lawsuit and claim to be without all or some electricity, and at least a half-dozen more have declined to sue.
Even when Cox wasn't on the stand, he met the judge's wrath. Several times, the judge told Cox to stop talking loudly into his attorney's ear. "I don't know if you learned to whisper in a sawmill or what," the judge said.
After Cox's poor performance, Lively asked the judge to cut the resident's rent in half. McCarthy, at first, seemed to think the residents hadn't proven their case. The judge explained that the residents had provided sufficient evidence that they've gone through hardships; their attorney argued that could not all be quantified. They needed a court-appointed expert to set a reasonable rate, the judge said.
"How do you get to 50 percent?" the judge asked Lively.
"I know," Lively admitted. "It's not scientific."
Finally, the judge, perhaps unimpressed by Cox's Springer-like performance, agreed. He ordered the residents to pay Cox half of the rent, and to deposit the other half with the court until the end of the lawsuit. More importantly, he also forbid Cox from evicting them. It seemed to be a resounding victory.
Outside the courtroom, Lively said the ruling is a sign that the lawsuit will go their way. She predicted it would set a powerful precedent forcing trailer park owners everywhere to maintain their parks or face the wrath of the courts. "All we want," Lively said, "is to see that these residents have a chance to move forward and to move out of there. That's not too much to ask."
But when you're down and out, establishing a legal precedent can seem like nothing but an academic exercise.
Henderson, sitting on a bench outside the courtroom, wiped away tears before they could mess up her mascara. She and some of the others had hoped the judge would reduce their rent. By sending half to the court, they'd still be paying the entire $270. Few of the residents had paid rent in at least a month, and the judge ordered all back rent to be paid within two months. McCarthy had unwittingly penalized those he was seeking to protect.
"I was saving up that money," Henderson explained. "I had given it to my sister for safekeeping. That was the only way I could find a new place, with that money. Now what am I gonna do? If I had a place to go, I'd just go and leave the trailer. But where am I gonna go?"
Back at the trailer park, most of the residents rejoiced. But Henderson sulked. "We still have to pay that son of a bitch," she said. "Why would I give anyone a dime who treated us this way?"
Two days after the hearing, McFayden spent a Friday afternoon cleaning out his rundown trailer. He worked first on the storage sheds outside. He plucked out tools and bits of metal to keep, then threw everything else into waist-high piles in the yard. He tossed heaps of clothes out of his bedroom. "I'm not keeping most of this shit," McFayden barked. "I've got a couple of suits. Good suits. I'm gonna keep them, and that's about it."
McFayden was finally moving out of his trailer. Not because Cox evicted him for the drug dealing going on there or because he owed $3,103 in back rent. No, McFayden said, he just finally got sick of living in a community where everybody hated him.
McFayden planned to live in his van for the moment. But he had plans to get an apartment soon in south Lake Worth. "Wes is even going to loan me $800 for the first, last, and security," he said. The money is payback for all those years he worked for Cox. It was apparently a relationship anchored in mutual convenience, with Cox turning a blind eye to the drug deals and late rent while McFayden carried out the odd jobs that kept the place barely functional.
For the residents, McFayden's unlamented departure, scurrying off to a different lair, only meant that things would get worse. Somebody scribbled "drug house closed" on the side of his trailer, McFayden said indignantly before he left.
"I guess they thought that was funny or something."
