Louis Gomez says his upstairs neighbor caused the water leak that sparked the lawsuit by his condo association.

His neighbor denies causing the leak, and the Palm Greens Condo 1 Association in West Delray says it sued the 95-year-old World War II veteran and recent cancer survivor because he refused multiple requests to allow workers to enter his 978-square-foot condo unit, built in 1974, to deal with mold caused by the leak.

After the association won the lawsuit and dispatched a repair crew to rip moldy walls and bathroom fixtures out of Gomez’s unit, it sent him a bill for nearly $18,000 for legal fees and repairs.

Gomez, who lives alone with no family and few friends, refuses to pay. He says “the big shots” are trying to take his home from him.

He said, “They said they tried to send letters to go to the court and all that. I said, ‘Look, I didn’t receive anything and I’m not going to any courts. I didn’t do anything wrong. OK? You people are all against me.’”

It’s a story that could be replicated more and more in coming years as condo unit owners and their buildings grow older together in South Florida.

Dawn Bauman, vice president of government and public affairs at the Community Association Institute trade group, said she doesn’t want to see frustrating standoffs increase as condo associations pay closer attention to their maintenance responsibilities following the 2021 collapse of the Champlain Towers South building in Surfside. Some associations with elderly tenants, she said, might benefit from access to organizations that can serve as a go-between and prevent the need for lawsuits.

Ryan Copple, the association’s lawyer, says no decision has been made to impose a lien or foreclose on Gomez’s home. But if Gomez continues to ignore the invoice, “the association will do everything in its power to collect what’s owed,” he said.

Bathroom left gutted

The lawsuit notably did not assert that Gomez caused the leak, nor did it include as exhibits copies of any reports from the plumber or the contractor that inspected the damage.

If a leak from an upstairs neighbor’s condo unit were to cause damage to the downstairs neighbor, the owners of the upstairs unit, or their insurance company, may be responsible for repairing it, according to the website of insurance giant Allstate.

A condo association’s master policy would be responsible only if the leak occurred in the lateral lines that feed individual units, said Paul Handerhan, president of the consumer-focused Federal Association for Insurance Reform.

Florida couple losing condo unit they’ve owned for 32 years to investor who changed the rules

The lawsuit accused Gomez of breaking association bylaws by failing to “maintain and repair” his unit. He failed to repair the leak and refused to run his air conditioner, “which adds to the mold problem,” the suit said.

The lawsuit sought a permanent injunction requiring Gomez to provide the association access to the unit, and to take “all necessary action” to remove the mold and make necessary repairs.

Gomez never hired an attorney, filed a response, or showed up for scheduled hearings where he could have argued that the leak wasn’t his fault.

When the association won its case by default in September 2022, the judge ordered Gomez to open his unit to repair workers. It took six months and a threat from the judge to hold him in contempt of court before he complied, court records show.

After Gomez let the workers into his unit, they gutted the entire bathroom. They removed the shower enclosure, the faucets, the toilet, the sink, the vanity, and the floor covering. They installed bare, unpainted drywall and left it that way, along with concrete floors.

Gomez wonders why the toilet, sink and faucets weren’t put back or replaced. “They’re putting a lien on my house because they said they fixed it,” he said. “But they didn’t fix it. They tore it apart. They made it worse.”

Copple says it’s Gomez’s responsibility to replace the bathroom fixtures. “Usually, fixtures are the owner’s decision on what they want to put in the unit,” Copple said.

Fortunately for Gomez, a second bathroom in his unit remains operable.

The latest invoice from the association orders Gomez to pay $17,970 — $8,411 in legal fees and $9,559 for the repair work. A letter dated June 19 warns that if he fails to pay, “we will proceed accordingly as permitted by law.”

In addition, a letter dated March 30 says that Gomez owes monthly assessments dating to September 2023. Gomez says the association refuses to accept his monthly checks as long as he owes the larger bill.

Homeowner survived radiation therapy

How this situation evolved to this point isn’t easy to pin down.

Gomez is one of an estimated 87,000 surviving U.S. veterans of World War II. Despite his advanced age, he comes across as sharp minded and personable, but prone to believing that the system is aligned against him.

While serving in the Navy after World War II, Gomez spent months on a destroyer ship that participated in a pair of nuclear weapon tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1946. A few years after he ended his eight-year tour, he learned that radiation exposure had left him sterile.

He says the radiation caused a tumor to form in his rectum that became so uncomfortable he could barely sit in a chair. The cancer was diagnosed in late 2022 while court files say he refused to provide the association access to his unit. Six months after the diagnosis, Gomez underwent five weeks of targeted radiation therapy and in May 2023, doctors told him the tumor was gone.

In November 2022, Doug Husen, then the association’s property manager, documented three attempts to convince Gomez to comply with the court order requiring him to let workers into his home.

“On Nov. 14, upon my knocking at the door, Mr. Gomez answered, yelling and stated he is having surgery and would get in touch afterward,” Husen wrote in an affidavit. “On Nov. 16, I saw Mr. Gomez in the parking lot and attempted to discuss coordination of access with him. However, Mr. Gomez started yelling and drove away.”

Gomez says the leaks originated because the owner of the unit directly above him failed to clear the pipes that discharge condensation from his air conditioner, causing water from the machine to back up. “All of a sudden, it comes down to my shower, OK, and it goes through the wall and I tell the property manager about it. And they all ganged up against me, of course.”

He says he never received notices to attend court hearings. The only time he signed for a document delivered to his door, the envelope was empty, he said.

Court filings state that twice when process servers arrived at his door to deliver documents, he refused to accept them and the documents were left in front of his door. But two other times, he was handed documents and took them, the filings say. They also show Gomez was ordered to attend several hearings through the Zoom app. Gomez says he doesn’t know what Zoom is.

Gomez’s upstairs neighbor told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that a plumber who checked out the leak “concluded no water was coming from my unit whatsoever.” Gomez, he said, “didn’t maintain his walls.” He added that Gomez never said anything to him about leaks from his air conditioner.

Paul Milowe, who served as the association’s president when the lawsuit was filed in 2022, said in an interview with the Sun Sentinel that he was told Gomez had a leak behind his shower wall that was causing mold. “It was a health issue and we told him to get it fixed,” he said.

Told that Gomez claimed that the leak was caused by his upstairs neighbor, Milowe said, “I don’t know the whole details.” He suggested contacting Husen, who managed the property in 2022.

Responding via text to a voicemail message, Husen said he doesn’t “work there anymore” and advised contacting the association’s current property manager or its attorney.

The current association president, Peter Lopez, said he wasn’t president when the lawsuit was filed and knew little about what transpired. He suggested contacting the association’s attorney, Ryan Copple.

Copple said he has only been the association’s attorney for a few months. He only knew what he was able to glean from the court files, he said. He suggested contacting the association’s previous attorney, Laurie Manoff.

Manoff, who filed the suit against Gomez on behalf of the association, did not respond to multiple emails and messages left with a receptionist at her law firm.

Should have defended himself, attorney says

Copple says Gomez should have gone to court and defended himself. “All I know is there was a leak,” he said. “If he thought he didn’t cause the leak, he could have had someone represent him to make that case.”

Gomez can still avoid foreclosure, Copple said. “Foreclosure is never an association’s goal,” he said. “I’m sure they’d love to resolve it if Gomez would sit down with them and work things out.”

Bauman, of the Foundation for Community Association Research, says situations similar to what occurred between Gomez and the Palm Greens Condo 1 Association isn’t unfolding across communities in a rampant or systematic way. “I think there are nuanced, unfortunate situations that hopefully could be addressed in conversations between owners and boards and management.”

She said condo managers might want to think about enlisting elderly service programs in Florida “that we could work with as an industry, cooperatively, to solve some of these problems before they become more than just a few anecdotal examples.”

Richalyn Miller, public information officer for the 15th Judicial Circuit court system in Palm Beach County, says litigants who receive notices to appear via Zoom have other options. They can request to appear at hearings in person or appear via the telephone number listed on the notice they receive, she said.

Gomez still doesn’t use his air conditioner. He says that since receiving the latest invoice, he has decided he wants his day in court. He reached out for assistance to the Legal Aid Society of Palm Beach County and to a legal assistance program offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs. They are reviewing his case, he said.

If the association were to eventually obtain a ruling allowing it to foreclose on his property, he says, “I would go to the Veterans Affairs and tell them, ‘This is what they did to me, you know. Can you find me a place to stay?’”

He says he has the $21,000 — which includes the monthly assessments he says the association refuses to take — and could pay the invoice if he wanted.

“Yeah, I could have done that,” he says. “But why should I give it to them? … They tore up my place and never finished the job. They left it half-assed. They did nothing.”

Ron Hurtibise covers business and consumer issues for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He can be reached by phone at 954-356-4071, on Twitter @ronhurtibise or by email at rhurtibise@sunsentinel.com.