How a double homicide in Fiji could leave a single mom homeless in California
UPDATE: Rachel Walker has since signed a lease on a new three-bedroom home.
In a blue-roofed house on a dusty road, Sesha Reddy and Mirdu Lata Chandra were beaten to death.
The couple had moved from Hercules, Calif., back to Fiji in retirement. In 2012, the Fiji Sun described Reddy as “an American investor” who returned to develop more than 100 acres into homes for former expatriates; in 2021, neighbors in the village by the Sigatoka River were shocked by the homicides.
Reddy and Chandra left no will, and their estates are being processed in a California court. Among their possessions is a single-story home with a small backyard in Rancho Cordova. Rachel Walker’s home.
Walker barely knew her landlords. But the intersection of California tenant law, international real estate investment and untimely death threatens to leave her and her children with no place to live.
Reddy and Chandra’s heirs appear poised to sell the home. They have informed Walker she needs to leave. And Walker, an Army veteran and a small business owner who has lived in the home for five years, is left with no real option.
“It’s a single-family dwelling; there’s no protection,” Walker said. “It’s only if it’s a multifamily dwelling. So unfortunately, I’m just kind of screwed.”
A sudden eviction
During Walker’s years in the three-bedroom, she met Chandra just twice and communicated with her mostly via WhatsApp. The expatriate homeowners never used a property manager. She paid her rent by depositing the money in a bank account each month.
That process became the first clue that something was wrong.
This past summer, Walker tried to pay the rent, but the account was closed. A bank employee told her she needed to contact her landlords immediately. Walker tried to call Chandra, but the number was disconnected.
At a loss, Walker turned to Google looking for Reddy’s number. Instead, she found news coverage of the gruesome unsolved homicides that had taken place five months prior. She had no idea what to do.
On Nov. 19, nearly 10 months after the couple died and about five months after Walker learned of their deaths, Walker’s teenage son, a high school freshman, came home from school and found a notice taped to their front door. In 60 days, the letter said, “You are required to vacate and surrender possession of the premises.”
He sent a series of frantic messages to his mother.
“He was kind of freaking out,” Walker said. She was driving home from a housecleaning job, and “he was messaging me: ‘Does this mean we have to move? Does this mean I can’t go to school where I go to school? What does this mean?’”
Walker did not have answers. She started panicking, too. She called the attorney on the letterhead.
“I had called over and over and over for probably two weeks,” Walker said. “He finally answered my call and said, ‘I don’t know why you keep calling here; my receptionist says you keep asking the same thing. Basically, all we have to do is give you the 60-day notice. If you don’t like it, and you don’t want to leave, we’ll start the eviction process.’ It was a shock to me, because I did nothing wrong.”
She said she had never violated the terms of her lease, and the notice did not list a past due balance or any grievance. Walker had been putting money aside each month to cover the rent.
Nevertheless, Walker soon learned from a series of housing attorneys that California law has few protections for tenants in single-family homes. Now, she’s scrambling to get out of the three-bedroom where she’s raised her three children since 2017 and collectively paid more than $75,000 in rent — with no buyout and, initially, only two-months’ notice, delivered one week before Thanksgiving.
“After talking to everybody, it didn’t seem like even spending the money on an attorney would do anything,” Walker said. “There’s no protection.”
Sacramento attorney Rachel Renno said: “There is this loophole for a single-family privately owned house.” Renno, who handles eviction cases for both landlords and tenants, said the state allows evictions without fault when the owner wants to move in or do extensive remodeling.
It also allows tenant evictions when the owner simply wants to stop renting the place. In any of those situations, a landlord only mustgive 60 days’ notice in writing for a tenant who’s been there for more than a year; if the tenant has lived there for less than a year, they only need to give 30 days’ notice.
When a house is owned by a business or a trust, Renno said, the landlord must either waive the last month’s rent or pay the tenant for some of their moving costs. But “the law says that if you’re a private owner, you don’t even have to do that.”
Given the minimum amount of warning and no moving costs, Walker begged the heirs’ attorney for a 30-day extension so she could move out at the end of February, rather than the end of January. Reddy’s son, Raja Reddy, agreed. The estate is still being processed through probate court, without a will. Raja and two other beneficiaries are the administrators of Reddy and Chandra’s estates, according to court records.
“If you don’t have a will, it follows your bloodline,” said Sacramento probate attorney Ed Fong. The court docket from Contra Costa County — where Reddy lived for decades and where he and Chandra owned another residence — lists multiple financial bonds filed in connection with the cases.
“That typically (means) they’re trying to sell a house,” Fong said. Walker also believes her landlords’ heirs intend to sell the house she lives in. According to Zillow, it’s worth more than $400,000.
Raja Reddy, who communicated with Walker once by email, did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails from The Bee seeking comment.
A troubled housing past
Walker said that Raja Reddy’s attorney told her that if she doesn’t move out by the deadline, the heirs will pursue a formal eviction. That threat is particularly menacing to Walker because she already has a Sacramento County eviction on her record.
According to court documents, a previous landlord filed an eviction case against her on May 12, 2015, writing that she hadn’t paid rent for that month. In a response filed with the court, Walker wrote that she’d attempted to make the $800 payment May 11, but the management company had refused to accept it.
Walker told The Bee she intentionally hadwithheld the rent because the property manager wouldn’t fix a plumbing issue that was causing water damage. She was at home all the time, pregnant with a surrogate baby, and concerned about mold; she said she had followed the law, which allows tenants to withhold rent under certain conditions.
Still, the court quickly allowed the eviction to proceed. A commissioner granted Walker one reprieve — on June 11, she submitted a form she filled out by hand, writing in a clear, blocky script that “having to vacate in five days would greatly affect my family and cause severe hardship. … I am requesting 10 days currently and whatever else the law will allow.”
The eviction was delayed to June 25.
On June 24, she asked for another extension. “I am due with a baby any day and have been on disability with limited funds,” she wrote. “I am on bed rest and have three children, ages 7, 9 and 12. … I can’t go into labor during moving or (with) no place to live, and my disability from the pregnancy makes it painful and hard to walk, move or stand for long.”
Sacramento Superior Court Commissioner Kenneth Brody responded with a court order: Her request was denied. “No good cause found,” he wrote. The sheriff’s office confirmed the eviction on June 26.
Walker’s eviction is what led her to the privately owned single family home in Rancho Cordova in the first place. She had been living in an apartment since the summer of 2015, and while she wanted to move into a house, she knew she would be rejected automatically by many professionally managed properties.
But Chandra, who Walker described as “super nice,” agreed to overlook the eviction. In February 2017, Walker and her three kids moved in.
Since then, Walker has spent more than $2,000 making repairs to the house, she said, because Chandra kept the rent low.
“When I moved in, she was like, ‘I want somebody who, if something happens, they can just fix it,’” Walker said. She never asked for reimbursement because she loved the location — close to her kids’ school, and next door to a beloved neighbor — and because she was afraid that the landlords could raise the rent on a whim.
Walker said Chandra “kept my rent at $1,488 a month. … I didn’t want to rock the boat with her.” So over the years, she replaced the refrigerator, the washing machine, the dryer and the dishwasher.
The house still needs numerous repairs, including a new air conditioning unit and significant plumbing work. Just this month, she said, her water heater was broken for a week and she had to buy a replacement part.
The house is “falling apart,” she said, but it’s home. When she and her kids moved in, she painted a black chalk wall in her sons’ bedroom, and everyone who’s ever visited them has signed it. They have a trampoline in the yard. Early in Walker’s tenancy, she was pregnant with another surrogate baby, and she stepped outside to see that her next-door neighbor had mowed her front lawn and left a mower on the front porch as a gift.
Now, she’s still living in the house, searching for a new home for herself and her two sons, 14 and 15, along with two small dogs and a 4-year-old tri-color Guinea pig. She spent her 37th birthday at home, feeling depressed; she spent the holidays obsessively refreshing listings, trapped in “a spiral of bad things.”
“It’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. It’s the longest my kids have ever lived anywhere,” Walker said. “We made the house a home, which makes this whole thing even harder. … I’ve centered my whole life around that house.”
Raja Reddy and the estates’ co-administrators extended her deadline to leave the property to Feb. 28. Housing prices have ballooned since her last move in 2017, and she’s bracing for the new realities of renting in Sacramento County.
“For a single mom who does it by herself, that’s so hard to think about putting out an extra almost $1,000, which is more stressful,” she said. “I have to do what I have to do to keep my kids here, keep my kids in school here.
“I don’t really have another choice.”
This story was originally published February 6, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
