The smell inside Justine Boulianne’s second floor apartment on Christophe-Colomb in Rosemont is nauseating.
On Thursday of last week, police discovered the decomposing body of a man in his 60s inside the apartment below hers. The man had been dead for some time, and the body had begun to decay.
Now almost a week later, the landlord still hasn’t disinfected the apartment where the man was found, and just a single window was left open to allow some air to circulate.
“I can’t sleep,” Boulianne said, standing in her kitchen, the dank stench heavy in the air. “It’s been quite a horrible week, I must admit.”
Boulianne is finding it hard to live a normal life with the smell and the knowledge of what lies just below her floorboards.
“How can you get used to the smell of rotting bile and stuff right underneath us,” she said. “When I turn the fan on there are 30 flies that come out of the fan. I know they are coming from downstairs.”
Boulianne now has to rid her kitchen of flies before preparing her food. She doesn’t eat in the kitchen anymore; instead, she takes her plate to the front of the unit where the smell isn’t as bad.
Louis-Charles Pitre lives one unit over from Boulianne. He operates a massage therapy clinic out of his apartment, and has had to cancel numerous clients since the discovery of the body.
“We believe he was there for a few days, maybe more so it was the beginning of the decay state.” he said, standing outside the open window to the man’s apartment. “The smell is a mix of all his physiological liquids, feces, there must be vomit in there, and blood.”
Both Pitre and Boulianne are concerned for their health and health of the other tenants in the building.
According to the neighbours, the landlord is refusing to disinfect the apartment because he is waiting on his insurance company before doing any work.
This doesn’t sit right with Rental Law Expert Ted Wright, who operates the Westmount Legal Clinic.
“People don’t have to live in that and the landlord is obligated to clean up that place,” he said in a phone interview. “The first step that they should take is to call a city inspector, and have them come in. If they are having flies, then that becomes unsafe.”
According to Wright, if there are concerns about the health and safety of a tenant, the city has the right to intervene, clean up the mess themselves, and pass the bill on to the landlord.
Of greater concern to both Pitre and Boulianne than the state of their own apartments, is the quality of life of the tenants living downstairs, on the same level as the man’s apartment.
The apartments on the first floor are social housing units and are occupied by people suffering from mental illness, they said.
“They don’t have many resources,” Pitre said. “They have mental issues and they’re living in that, and they don’t know better. There is supposed to be somebody coming by to check on them, but we see that it has been let go for months.”