A California mom was almost evicted after her landlords were killed. At last, she’s moving
The single mother at the center of a Sacramento Bee story says she has found a new house to rent after a double homicide in the South Pacific and a private landlord–friendly state law threatened to leave her homeless.
Nearly 10 months after Rachel Walker’s landlords were found slain in their primary home in Fiji, Sesha Reddy and Mirdu Lata Chandra’s heirs gave Walker a 60-day notice to vacate the Rancho Cordova home she’d lived in for five years.
The heirs’ attorney told her that if she didn’t leave by the deadline, they would start a formal eviction.
Because of the way California law is structured for private owners of single-family homes, Walker only was afforded two months’ notice and wasn’t entitled to any moving costs or compensation, even though she hadn’t violated the terms of her lease.
Ultimately, the heirs agreed to extend her stay in the three-bedroom home until the end of February, which gave her just enough time to secure new housing: Walker signed her lease and dropped off her security deposit Feb. 7, and plans to begin her move next week.
“It’s been stressful,” she said. “In this market, it’s not easy. Literally a day before I found this property manager, I sat in my garage and I had a heart-to-heart with God.”
When asked how many houses she had applied for since receiving the 60-day notice in November, Walker said, “Oh god,” and took a long pause. She’d applied to at least 10.
“It was really just a fight,” she said. When one three-bedroom home caught her eye, she filled out an application, then called the property management company to ask how many other people were trying to live there, too. “They had 15 other applicants,” she said. “It’s just not fair.”
Her new home is a 30-minute drive from her kids’ school, a significantly longer commute. But Walker is excited to live in a larger, recently renovated home. The rent in the new home is about $850 more than her current place, slightly less of an increase than she feared. She said she also plans to take the large appliances she bought for the Rancho Cordova house with her.
She’s disappointed, she said, at the way her deceased landlords’ heirs chose to press her out of the house. Since Sesha Reddy and Mirdu Lata Chandra’s deaths, Raja Reddy has only communicated with her directly one time, when he sent her a contract to formalize a Feb. 28 move-out. Otherwise, she said he’s ignored her phone calls and emails. He did not respond to an inquiry from The Bee seeking comment for this story.
Walker had only ever interacted with one of her late landlords, Chandra. But Walker said she was fond of the woman who let her and her three children move into the three-bedroom home, in spite of her eviction history.
“I do look at it like, ‘Okay, she gave me a chance,’” Walker said. “This was a chance to move out of an apartment, into a house, build a home with my kids. Even though I didn’t know her personally, when she passed, and I found out that she passed — especially the way she did — that was still an emotional thing for me, too. And it was me also thinking about the family. I didn’t think for a second that they were gonna be the way they are. I did feel for them.
“I wish they would have thought about my family, too.”
