Earlier this week a lawsuit filed by the city of St. Louis limned in 57 pages the human misery brought to bear by a group of slumlords’ sprawling south city operation. The city accused its perpetrators of turning condemned buildings into illegal rooming houses, preying on vulnerable people by taking their cash in exchange for near-uninhabitable spaces.
But for the residents of one block of Virginia Avenue in Tower Grove East, there was nothing new in the suit's details. They'd had an up-close look as the nightmare unfolded for years.
For the past several years, the slowly falling apart home on Virginia Avenue, three doors down from Sidney Street, had at any given time between six and ten people living inside — some only there a short while, others staying long enough to become fixtures in the neighborhood.
Outside, the house sports a Dutch gambrel roof, a near-ancient retention wall and a boarded front door with "no trespassing" and the date 12-6-23 tagged on it.
Inside, neighbors describe a house that was until recently a reservoir of human suffering. For a while, a man who used a colostomy bag and wasn't getting proper medical care would be carted off by EMTs in his own excrement roughly once a month. Others living at the house huddled around an electric oven in the winter, the only way to keep warm. One resident died during a summer heat wave in 2022 and left in a body bag.
And then there was the landlord, Dara Daugherty.
"She used to come by at all hours of the night and scream at them to pay her money," says Brittany Marquardt, who has lived next door for four years.
On Tuesday, Daugherty and five of her associates, several of whom are her relatives, were hit with a bombshell lawsuit by the city's Affirmative Litigation Unit. The suit accuses them of running an illegal operation spanning 39 properties across nine south city neighborhoods.
On Virginia Avenue, the RFT spoke to three neighbors of the Daugherty property who all had up-close looks at one of the places the city's lawsuit says does not meet the minimum criteria to be considered a "habitable space." The lawsuit states that between 2018 to 2023, the city's Building Division issued seven notices of condemnation for the property as well as notices of 159 ordinance violations, according to the lawsuit filed by the city. Yet Daugherty continued to rent it out room by room.
Marquardt got to know many of the people living there. She and other neighbors seem to have genuinely cared about their welfare. They were at times hesitant to call the police for fear that people living at the house would wind up in an even worse spot. She recalls that two men told others in the neighborhood they had previously been living in a tent.
"It’s almost like she was knocking on tents, saying, 'Hey, I got a place for you,'" Marquardt says of Daugherty.
The lawsuit filed against Daugherty claims that she sought out new tenants in homeless shelters and food pantries. It accuses her of preying on the "vulnerable and indigent" and those suffering mental illness or drug addiction. Daugherty allegedly bragged that she pulled in $40,000 a month from the scheme.
The RFT reached out to Daugherty via phone and Facebook messenger on Tuesday, the day of the lawsuit's filing. We tried again yesterday for this story. Both times we got no response.
"I know these were people who had mental issues, but they deserve better. They were humans," says Joseph Goodman of the people living in the Virginia Avenue rental. Goodman, a nurse, shares an alley with Daugherty's property and he helps run the Tower Grove East Community Garden at the end of the block.
A lack of basic services combined with untreated mental and physical ailments made for an often bleak scene inside the Virginia Avenue house. The man who lived there with the colostomy bag, who some of the others called "dad," referred to rats as "his babies" and had trained them to eat off his chest. One adult living there would ask neighbors for help reading basic instruction manuals. For extended periods of time the house seemed to be without functioning plumbing.
Yet Daugherty still got paid. "Tenants report that Daugherty requires them to sign over their government checks to pay rent," the suit against her says.
Police records indicate they have been called to the Virginia Avenue property 42 times since 2017. City records show 17 complaints made to the Citizen Services Bureau in that same time period. Those complaints were for everything from bed bugs to raw garbage on the premises, cave-ins to rats. Marquardt shared with the RFT emails she exchanged with the police’s Problem Properties Unit dating back to June and messages she sent to a state elder abuse investigator in the summer of 2022. “I'd say I contact someone about that house once a month,” she says.
City Hall spokesman Nick Dunne tells the RFT, "A lawsuit like this takes a long time — it started with the diligent work of impacted residents filing Citizens Service Bureau requests and calling 911 when necessary. While the Building Division must first give property owners the opportunity to resolve code or ordinance violations, repeated violations will then move to the Problem Properties Unit."
Dunne adds that the involvement of the city's Affirmative Litigation Unit, the entity which filed the lawsuit against Daugherty, demonstrates that the Problem Properties Unit had all they could within their scope of work.
The house on Virginia Avenue at times had no functioning toilet, Marquardt says, leaving the people living there to use a bucket for their bathroom, which they would then dump out the window on the side of the house facing Marquardt's home. Marquardt built a berm to stop the pee from flowing into her yard.
"I would ask them, 'Hey guys, I know your situation is dire, but could you dump the urine on the other side where there isn't anyone living?'" she says.
Goodman helped maintain a food pantry in the community garden, stocked with perishable items, put there in part with Daugherty’s tenants in mind.
"If the property was livable, and had running water and electricity and AC in the summer, heat in winter, I wouldn't have a problem with a reasonable number of those people living there," says Goodman, who added that he appreciated how one of the people living there, Larry, kept an eye the alley. "It would have been fine."
At least one death has occurred at the property since 2017. The lawsuit filed by the city references an instance of "a human corpse being removed from the property by authorities." Goodman says it was his understanding that when one of the people living at the house didn't pay their rent, Daugherty turned off the electricity to the entire building.
In the summer of 2022 a man who the neighborhood knew only as Warren was living on the third floor. One day, an ambulance showed up and took Warren out in a body bag. No one knows with complete certainty, but they believe he may have died from the heat.
Marquardt says that the very next day after Warren's death, someone showed up to the house to install a window AC unit.
"I got into a shouting match," Marquardt says, incensed that air conditioning was only being installed now. The man replied that Warren's death was Warren’s fault — he was supposedly too "retarded" to put in a box fan.
Despite the dilapidated nature of the house, there is some evidence to suggest the block may hold a special significance for Daugherty.
The lot adjacent to the condemned property is a large, two and a half-story Italian Renaissance style house built in 1870. It is also in a state of disrepair. Scaffolding surrounds it, but neighbors tell the RFT the rehab job is incredibly slow moving.
Goodman, who is something of a block historian, says the house would have originally been a farmhouse, the first on the entire block. Portions of a stone wall spanning almost half the block speak to the massive lot it would have sat on more than 150 years ago. (The lawsuit accused Daugherty and her crew of illegally renting this building out as well.)
The whole block seems to have been well aware of Daugherty before her name hit the news Tuesday. The scuttle is that both she and her mom, Garon, who is now deceased but is mentioned in the city's lawsuit, grew up in that Italian Renaissance style home. Property records show it now belongs to Daniel McAfee, a co-defendant in the city's lawsuit, listed as "aka Daniel Daugherty.
Neighbors struggle to describe how they interpreted Daugherty's relationship to her tenants, other than to say it was predatory.
One neighbor said that she often saw Daugherty outside the property she was renting out, though she never saw her actually go inside. She'd see her in the alley, in her car, and saw her occasionally smoke weed in the car with people she was renting her house to. This neighbor said she didn't want to give her name because "Dara's family has been around this city a long time."
Both Goodman and Marquardt say that Daugherty was manipulating some of the people who lived at the Virginia Avenue property, or at the very least she held a sway over them that extended well beyond the usual landlord-tenant relationship.
Goodman recounts one time he offered to pay the man he knew as Larry to do some painting on the exterior of Goodman's house.
Goodman says Larry replied, "You're going to have to call Dara. I can't do anything without Dara's permission."
The response struck Goodman as odd, to say the least.
The neighbors say that around the middle of last month, after years of their complaining, the police's Problem Properties Unit came by and cleared everyone out for good.
As for the people who were living at the house, "I think they've been shuffled to different properties of hers," Marquardt says. “She has so many.”
The neighbor who didn't want to give her name recalls one evening shortly before everyone in the house got kicked out when she saw Larry in the alley behind the house on Virginia Avenue. He was unusually standoffish. This neighbor had given Larry food,coats, boots and the occasional beer. She'd bought him new waterproof boots for Christmas. Now, she asked him why he was so reluctant to have their usual chat. Daugherty had told him that she, the neighbor who bought him the waterproof boots, had called the police on him. This wasn't true, the neighbor tried to explain.
"I told him, 'She's lying to you,'" this neighbor recalls.
"The poor man was about brought to tears," she said.
She could see what she was saying sink in, but only to an extent. And only temporarily so.
This story has been updated with comments from a City Hall spokesman. They ask anyone who may have been affected by or rented from Daugherty to contact the city's Civil Rights Enforcement Agency at 314-622-3301.
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