Citrus Heights apartment where resident died after ceiling collapse hit with lawsuit

The last time Danielle Fiddy saw her father was Oct. 25, a Monday night when she went to his Citrus Heights apartment to pick up Bella, her Pomeranian that he had been watching for her that day.

Three days later, she got a 10 a.m. phone call from Ronald Villa’s doctor’s office telling her that her father had missed an appointment and asking where he was.

“I called the apartment complex just in case he was in distress, because it wasn’t like him to miss an appointment, and they called me a couple minutes later and said he had passed away,” Fiddy said.

But there was more to it than a 72-year-old dying alone in his apartment.

“I got there and the police were there, the fire department was leaving,” she said. “A friend of mine was with me, they wouldn’t let me in the apartment, and my friend actually forced his way through to say, ‘This is his daughter, she has the right to be in there,’ and they finally let me in.”

Once she got into the $905-a-month studio at the Arcade Creek Manor apartment complex, she was stunned.

“The way the ceiling was, it was just a huge, huge hole in the ceiling,” she said. “The sheetrock, the insulation was all over the floor. It was soaking wet, everything was wet. When you walked in the carpet squished from it being wet. ...

“I just stood there in disbelief at what I was looking at.”

Lying across the bed sideways was her father, an Air Force veteran of the Vietnam War and longtime pool service owner who was dead when authorities arrived that day.

“It almost looked like a bomb went off,” said Fiddy’s attorney, Moseley Collins, who has filed a wrongful death and negligence lawsuit against Arcade Creek Manor over Villa’s death. “Water got into the ceiling over a long period of time and collapsed this entire ceiling — and it weighed a lot — and it apparently fell in on her dad.

“He died of a bleed in his brain from being hit. His skull was hit by the falling ceiling.”

The apartment complex manager, who identified herself as Sara”and refused to give a last name, declined to comment Wednesday when reached by The Bee.

But Fiddy and Collins say the ceiling collapse came after Villa had complained to management about a leak in the apartment ceiling and that Villa believed the problem had been fixed.

Instead, Collins said, the leak continued, and when he inspected the site after Villa’s death he found a foil turkey dripping pan.

“We found that in the ceiling,” he said. “It looked like it was put up there to catch water.”

The lawsuit, filed in Sacramento Superior Court, alleges that apartment managers had previously attempted to repair leak problems at the apartment at 6656 St. Ives Place, but failed to repair leaks in the roof and pipes in the ceiling.

The suit seeks general, special and punitive damages, and Collins said it also is designed to “bring justice” and serve as a warning to other property owners that they have to maintain their premises.

The complex off Dewey Drive bills itself as a “unique non-smoking senior living community” with “beautiful apartments” that “make you feel at home,” and includes an online form to report maintenance needs.

Villa had lived there alone since July 2019, according to a lease included with the lawsuit as an exhibit, and spent virtually every day talking or texting with his daughter, a 46-year-old esthetician whose Fair Oaks business offers facials, waxing and other services about a 10-minute drive from the complex.

He loved animals and doted on her dog, Fiddy said, and the week he died she knew something was wrong because she had posted a photo of Bella on Facebook that got no response from her father.

“If I posted on Facebook, he was usually the first one to comment on it,” she said.

Fiddy decided he was probably out to dinner with a friend and didn’t know anything was wrong until the call from Villa’s doctor woke her up the morning of Oct. 28.

When she went inside the apartment, her father’s body was still there, covered with a throw her friend had placed over it so she wouldn’t have to see his body.

But something was off, Fiddy said. There was a bucket up against a wall filled with water, as if it had been placed there to deal with a leak.

And the bed had been pulled away from the wall under where the ceiling had collapsed. Her father’s body was dressed in one slipper and sweatpants, but no shirt, which she said was out of character for her father.

“My dad always had clothes on,” she said. “He was a relatively thin man, so he got cold.

“And he wasn’t laying in bed, he was laying across it. His feet were on the floor. It was like he had fallen back.”

The scene suggested Villa was killed when the ceiling fell in on him, but Fiddy said exactly what happened and when remains a mystery, and that apartment officials were not helpful.

“They just told me that it has always been a problem apartment,” she said. “That’s all they told me.

“They said it’s always been a problem apartment. That was it. And I wasn’t sure which part they were talking about, the part that my dad died, or the part where the ceiling had fallen in.”