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Man Comes Home To Find Apartment Emptied Out By Mistake
By
John Del Signore
Published Mar 5, 2014
Modified Mar 5, 2014
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By
John Del Signore
Published Mar 5, 2014
Modified Mar 5, 2014
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After living in a "perfect" Upper East Side apartment for eight months, Nilay Shroff returned home from his IT job in October to find almost all of his possessions gone. The kitchen table, the bed, his dresser, his passport, all of his clothes, kitchen supplies, his precious Mariano Rivera bobblehead—POOF. Shroff tells ABC 7, "Just think of everything that you've acquired in your lifetime in your house just gone!" Oddly enough, his TV and his PS3 were left behind, like unlucky sinners after the Rapture.
Shroff assumed he'd been robbed and called 911, but says, "The cops were like, 'We've never seen anything like this.' They were laughing. They said, ‘It’s not a robbery — the TV and the PS3 would be the first things gone.' And robbers wouldn’t disassemble my bed." They also probably wouldn't have stolen a photograph of Shroff and his mother, who passed away when he was ten.
According to Shroff, the building's management company had contracted a cleaning crew to clear out apartment 2B. But the landlord allegedly gave them the key to Shroff's apartment, 2D, instead, and by the time he got home everything was en route to a dump. "It's every single piece of clothing that I owned. Like, underwear, I have to go to Target the next morning to just buy underwear," Shroff laments.
The past several months have been a busily spent furnishing his apartment, and preparing to sue the company that manages the East 74th Street building. Shroff is seeking $40,000 in damages—he says the management company offered to compensate him for just half of what his lost possessions were worth.
A story like this does make you wonder—how much is all that crap I've accumulated in my life actually worth, if I estimated its dollar value? Probably 875 bucks, and that includes my nightstand. And would renter's insurance cover a ludicrous snafu like this?
Tagged
landlords
Nilay Shroff
upper east side
why god
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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