Starboard Real Estate
When the Leasing Office Becomes a Dangerous Front Line
As mental health systems frayed and tenant protections tightened, a growing share of the fallout and risk of violence has quietly landed in apartment hallways and leasing offices—places staffed largely by workers hired to sell and service housing—not to manage violent crises—and given little protection or backup as they increasingly face life-or-death situations.
A Routine Eviction Turned Into a Travesty
On an August morning in 2022, the assignment looked painfully ordinary: serve an eviction, change the locks, move on to the next file.
Pima County Constable Deborah Martinez-Garibay, a 43-year-old Army veteran, walked into the Lind Commons Apartments in midtown Tucson with the property’s new manager, 28-year-old Angela Fox-Heath. They were there to enforce a court order against 24-year-old tenant Gavin Lee Stansell.
What happened next was anything but routine.
According to police, Stansell opened fire, killing Martinez-Garibay, Fox-Heath, and a neighboring tenant, 25-year-old Elijah Miranda, before turning the gun on himself.
Martinez-Garibay had served in Afghanistan. Fox-Heath had only recently taken on the job of managing the complex. Neither took the job imagining that enforcing a lease could turn into a life‑or‑death decision.
To anyone who has spent time in the trenches of property management, the deeper shock in Tucson wasn’t that it happened—it was how surprised everyone else seemed that it could happen at all.
The Silent Risk in American Housing
This story is not just about one horrific eviction. It is about how a series of policy choices—on mental health, homelessness, landlord–tenant law, and code enforcement—have quietly shifted risk out of hospitals, courts, police departments, and social-service systems and into private apartment communities.
Front-line property staff now find themselves acting as unarmed first responders to crises involving untreated mental illness, addiction, domestic violence, and serious violent or criminal behavior. These workers, overwhelmingly women in leasing and other front-of-house roles, are legally responsible for enforcing leases and maintaining “order,” yet many operate with limited training and security, and with few clear, legally safe options for how to navigate threats to their own safety—working in a system that expects housing providers to absorb risk without the legal or public support that hospitals, police departments, and social-service agencies receive.
At the same time, tenant-protection laws, chronic-nuisance ordinances, and public-records rules can expose both residents and staff to retaliation when they complain about dangerous behavior. In practice, the people who open the leasing office each morning are often the ones standing in the gap between tenants in crisis, frightened neighbors, slow police response, and a largely theoretical safety net.
From Hospitals to Hallways: How Policy Moved Crisis Into Housing
The hazards inside many apartment communities today did not appear overnight. They’re tied to a long arc of mental health and housing policy that steadily off-loaded responsibility from institutions to communities—without building the promised supports.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the Mental Health Systems Act, designed to strengthen a nationwide network of community mental health centers. (2) The law was meant to be the safety net for people who could not get care any other way.
Within a year, much of that architecture was dismantled. In 1981, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act was signed by President Ronald Reagan, repealing key provisions of the law and replacing dedicated mental-health funding with broader block grants to the states—money that advocates say never kept pace with the need. (3)
The result, over decades, has been familiar in many cities: fewer psychiatric beds, long waits for treatment, and people in evident crisis ending up on sidewalks, in shelters, in jails—and in market-rate or subsidized apartments that were never designed to function as de facto mental-health facilities.
Crucially, most people with mental health conditions are not violent and are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators; the problem is that when the system fails them, the rarer, high‑risk cases—those involving untreated illness, substance abuse, weapons, and extreme distress—are less likely to be caught early and more likely to play out in ordinary residential settings. (4) That is where property staff enter the picture.
The “Office” That Isn’t Just an Office
Walk into almost any staffed apartment community and you’ll typically see the same scene: a front desk, a leasing office with a coffee station, maybe a bowl of dog (or human) treats and some feel-good music setting the vibe. The people behind that desk are disproportionately women—especially in leasing and assistant manager roles, where national workforce estimates suggest that roughly three-quarters of leasing staff are women. (5)
Across the broader category of property, real estate, and community association managers, women make up a majority of the front-line office workforce.
These workers are the ones who:
Take angry calls about maintenance delays
Knock on doors to discuss late rent
Walk grounds where drug dealing or prostitution may be occurring
Serve as the “face” of management in neighborhoods already angry about homelessness or crime
Yet federal workplace-safety rules have never been tailored specifically to multifamily housing. Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s General Duty Clause, employers must provide a workplace “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm,” even where no specific standard exists. (6)
Workplace violence is now explicitly recognized as such a hazard in health care and social services. (7) But for apartment staff—who routinely confront residents in crisis, attempt to enforce unpopular rules, and arbitrate neighbor disputes—there is little clear guidance on what “reasonable steps” to reduce that hazard should look like.
In practice, many leasing offices have:
No security presence
Minimal threat-assessment training
Limited ability to refuse service to residents who have threatened staff short of initiating an eviction process that can take months
When things go wrong, the consequences look like news coverage: a quick burst of attention, a tragic photo, and then silence.
When Routine Contact Turns Deadly
The Tucson killings are one high-profile example. But the pattern—routine landlord–tenant contact escalating to lethal violence—has surfaced repeatedly in recent years.
The 93-Year-Old With a Handgun
In January 2020, at an apartment complex off the Las Vegas Strip, 93-year-old tenant Robert Thomas confronted the building’s manager over water damage in his unit. (8) According to court records and local reporting, Thomas pulled a handgun and shot the manager in both legs, seriously injuring him.
Video of the frail, white-haired man being led away in handcuffs went viral. What received far less sustained attention was the fact that a routine maintenance dispute—something handled every day by on-site staff across the country—had nearly become a workplace homicide.
The Chicago Landlord in the Freezer
In Chicago’s Arcadia Terrace neighborhood in October 2022, 69-year-old landlord and pianist Frances Walker was killed and dismembered by her tenant, Sandra Kolalou. (9) Prosecutors said Walker had served Kolalou with an eviction notice shortly before the murder.
Walker’s remains were later found in a freezer and in a garbage can near a lakeshore park. Kolalou was later convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to decades in prison. The dispute began as a landlord enforcing the lease.
The Houston Owner Who Vanished
In Houston, Texas, 78-year-old landlord Colin Kerdachi disappeared in 2021. (10) Nearly two years later, his skeletal remains were discovered under a back stairway at his Montrose property. Prosecutors allege he was stabbed to death by a tenant during a winter storm, then impersonated as that tenant collected rent from other residents.
Kerdachi’s tenants later described being asked to scrub blood from walls, unsure at first whether a crime had even occurred.
The Homestead Dispute
In November 2023, Miami-Dade police say a dispute between a landlord and tenant in Homestead, Florida, turned into a deadly attack. (11) Investigators allege that a 22-year-old tenant stabbed and beat his landlord to death after the landlord came to check on him.
The Resident Manager in Sacramento
On a summer afternoon in 2024, at a South Sacramento apartment complex, a resident manager was shot and killed outside her office. (12) Sheriff’s officials say a 66-year-old tenant argued with her before shooting her multiple times.
The manager was not just an employee; she lived on site. Friends and residents later gathered for a candlelight vigil outside her office door.
The Senior Housing Manager in Anaheim
In April 2024, police in Anaheim, California, responded to reports of a shooting at a senior apartment complex. (13) They say a resident opened fire on the building manager during a dispute, then killed himself, in what investigators described as an apparent murder–suicide.
These cases span different states and circumstances. In some, mental illness is alleged; in others, the motive appears to be anger over eviction, rent, or property rules. What they share is the setting: ordinary rental housing. And in each, an owner, manager, or front-line employee became the most accessible target for someone in crisis.
A Washington Complex at the Breaking Point
The risks are not limited to headline-grabbing homicides. In many communities, violence and intimidation simmer just below that threshold, leaving workers fearful but still expected to show up every day.
At the Copper Gate Apartments in Auburn, Washington, that simmer boiled over. Opened in 2020 as a new affordable community along Auburn Way North, a busy commercial arterial lined with car lots, gas stations, and fast-food joints, Copper Gate became the subject of repeated local news coverage for shootings in and around the property.
By late May 2023, residents told reporters there had been multiple shootings in a single week in and around the complex. (14) In one incident, a man was left in critical condition; in another, police counted dozens of bullet casings at the scene.
Neighbors described ducking for cover, avoiding their balconies, and keeping children indoors. Eventually, Auburn police entered into a special “use agreement” with Copper Gate, allowing officers to use one of the units as a sort of substation.
For managers trying to hold a property together under that kind of pressure, every overnight shooting and every unresolved incident becomes more than a statistic—it’s another memo, another conversation with owners, another risk that a frightened resident will move out, a lender will flag the asset, or the city will label the building a “chronic nuisance.”
In Washington State, nuisance law is a patchwork of state statutes and local ordinances. (15) State law defines a nuisance broadly as activity that endangers health or safety or renders people “insecure in life, or in the use of property.” Cities then layer their own chronic-nuisance codes on top, allowing officials to send warning letters, demand corrective plans, and ultimately sue or fine property owners if repeated criminal or code violations occur.
The goal is understandable: push problem owners to act. The reality on the ground can be knotty. Owners in high-crime corridors may find themselves blamed for broader conditions they do not fully control. Managers may be caught between city pressure to “clean up” a property and tenant-protection laws that rightly make eviction a slow and carefully regulated tool.
One property manager described repeatedly calling police about open-air drug dealing and prostitution just outside a complex near a regional mall, only to see little visible response. At the same time, complaining residents worried that if they reported specific neighbors by name, those complaints could become public records—potentially exposing them to retaliation.
Under Washington’s Public Records Act, information in code-enforcement complaints is generally disclosable, though agencies can choose to withhold the complainant’s identity if disclosure would endanger someone’s life, safety, or property. (16) In practice, that nuance is not widely understood in leasing offices or among frightened tenants.
For managers, it can feel like a no-win scenario: if they act aggressively to remove dangerous tenants, they may face legal challenges, accusations of discrimination, or extended non-payment while cases move through the courts. If they don’t act, they risk chronic-nuisance enforcement, lender anxiety, reputational damage—and the unthinkable possibility of someone getting killed.
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“These reforms address real, historic barriers. But when combined with insufficient mental-health care, weak social-service follow-through, and persistent neighborhood crime, they can leave front-line staff feeling that everyone else’s priorities come before their safety.”
Laws That Protect Tenants but Leave Workers Exposed
It is important to state clearly: strong tenant protections are a response to decades in which renters, especially low-income and Black and brown tenants, were routinely displaced with little recourse. Washington’s Residential Landlord–Tenant Act and recent reforms around eviction notices, rent increases, and screening are designed to give people more stability in their homes. (17)
But those rules were written with the relationship between landlord and tenant in mind. They seldom contemplate the position of the on-site staff member—often a woman in her 20s or 30s—tasked with delivering bad news to a person who may be armed, intoxicated, or in severe psychological distress.
Similarly, nuisance and code-enforcement regimes tend to focus on owners and city agencies. They do not map well onto the granular reality of day-to-day property management: deciding whether to post a notice on a unit where the tenant has threatened staff; weighing whether to let a known violent occupant stay because the risk of an immediate confrontation feels higher than the risk of waiting for an eviction hearing.
Federal workplace-safety law offers a broad principle—that employers must reduce recognized hazards—but little specific guidance for multifamily housing. OSHA has detailed materials on workplace violence in health care and social services; apartment leasing offices fall into a gray zone where the hazard is obvious but the best practices are not.
In the absence of tailored standards, policies vary widely:
Some owners install secure entry, panic buttons, and clear protocols for when staff may refuse in-person meetings.
In interviews, some staff say they are expected to walk units alone, confront unauthorized occupants, or handle volatile rent-collection conversations with little more than a phone in their pocket.
The law does not forbid owners from doing more to protect workers. It simply does not require them to do very much, either.
What Frontline Staff See That Policymakers Don’t
Ask people who actually run apartment communities what keeps them up at night, and the answers rarely fit neatly into one policy category.
They talk about
The long-term resident whose mental state has clearly deteriorated, but who refuses treatment and whose behavior alarms neighbors without crossing obvious legal lines.
The domestic-violence situation where the victim begs management not to “make it worse,” even as police and advocates urge documentation and safety planning.
The formerly homeless tenant placed through an overstretched service provider who cannot keep up with the support originally promised.
The complaint system in which every call to code enforcement or police is another entry in a public record that might anger the very people causing problems.
They also talk about the moral bind: wanting to house people who have nowhere else to go, especially in an era of soaring rents and visible street homelessness, while not sacrificing the basic safety of the community—or their own.
Research on mental illness and violence urges nuance: serious mental illness alone is a weak predictor of violent behavior; substance use, youth, prior violence, and environmental stressors like poverty and housing instability are stronger risk factors. (4)
But property staff do not encounter risk factors in abstract. They encounter:
A tenant who has stopped paying rent and begun destroying property
A man pacing the breezeways with a bat at 2 a.m.
Someone screaming threats through a paper-thin wall
As several managers describe it, they call 911, explain that someone is threatening or out of control, and then they wait. Minutes stretch; sometimes an officer eventually appears, sometimes no one does, and the message they take from that is that in the moment, they are on their own.
The Crisis in Apartment Management Today
All of this unfolds against a broader backdrop of housing stress.
In many markets, rents have risen faster than incomes and genuinely affordable options have grown scarce—a pressure that shows up in fuller buildings and more desperate housing searches, not just in charts about price growth. (18)
At the same time, some jurisdictions have reduced landlords’ ability to screen tenants based on eviction history or criminal background, in an effort to combat discrimination and open doors for people with records. (19)
These reforms address real, historic barriers. But when combined with insufficient mental-health care, weak social-service follow-through, and persistent neighborhood crime, they can leave front-line staff feeling that everyone else’s priorities come before their safety.
Policy debates tend to frame these tensions as binary: pro-tenant vs. pro-landlord, tough-on-crime vs. housing-first. The view from the leasing office is far messier.
Staff are held accountable by owners, lenders, city inspectors, police, neighbors, and tenants—all at once. They are expected to be trauma-informed, de-escalation-trained, legally precise, and perpetually polite. They are also expected to unlock the door each morning knowing that in Tucson, Sacramento, Anaheim, and elsewhere, people with their exact job titles have been killed doing exactly what they do.
Where the Accountability Conversation Needs to Go
The stories in this article do not suggest that people with mental illness are inherently dangerous. They do not argue that tenant protections should be rolled back wholesale, or that landlords are the primary victims of a system that fails everyone at once.
They do suggest that any serious conversation about housing, homelessness, mental health, and public safety should include a group often left out of the frame: the people who run apartment communities day to day.
If lawmakers and regulators want to know where systems are failing, they might start with questions like:
How often are property managers and leasing staff threatened, assaulted, or killed on the job, and how is that data being tracked?
What specific guidance should OSHA and state agencies issue about workplace violence in multifamily housing?
How can chronic-nuisance and code-enforcement tools be structured so they pressure bad-faith owners without punishing good-faith ones who inherit broader neighborhood problems?
Can complaint systems better protect the identity and safety of tenants and staff who report dangerous activity, while still ensuring due process?
How will states rebuild mental-health and supportive-housing capacity so that the most acute cases are not simply left to apartment staff to manage?
These are not questions a single landlord, tenant, or property manager can answer alone. They sit at the intersection of health care, policing, civil rights, labor law, and housing policy.
What Tucson, Chicago, Houston, Homestead, Sacramento, Anaheim, Auburn, and many quieter cases in between make clear is that the front desk has already become a front line. The only open question is whether the people who work there will continue to shoulder that risk largely in silence—or whether the systems that rely on them will finally recognize, measure, and mitigate the danger baked into the job.
This Risk Is Real
At Starboard Real Estate, we’re exposing a growing crisis: apartment staff are being asked to manage violent, high-risk situations with little protection.
What was once leasing and maintenance work has become front-line crisis response. It’s time to acknowledge the danger—and act.
Join us in pushing for change.
(253) 988‑6600 | info@starboard.realestate