Background: Shore Inn hotel in Ventura, California (Google Maps). Inset: Bedbugs found inside hotel room (Brian J. Virag).
A California jury has granted $2 million to two hotel guests after they suffered from “painful” bedbug bites, severe skin rashes, and injuries covering their entire bodies due to staying in infested rooms.
The plaintiffs, Alvaro Gutierrez and Ramiro Sanchez, checked into The Shores Inn at 1059 South Seaward Ave. in Ventura, near the Pacific Ocean, on February 7, 2020, according to the complaint accessible through Law&Crime. Once in their room, they quickly fell victim to a bedbug infestation. After they informed the hotel staff, they were relocated to another room.
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“Despite being moved to a different room, Room 109 of the hotel, the plaintiffs continued to suffer severe bedbug bites,” as stated in the complaint.
Despite staying in the room just one night, the guests suffered numerous bites, the lawsuit said.
“The bed bugs latched onto the Plaintiffs while they slept, sucked their blood until they were gorged, and resisted eradication,” the complaint said. “Plaintiffs suffered from numerous bed bug bites, which caused and presently continue to cause pain, discomfort, annoyance, sleeplessness, inconvenience, humiliation, anxiety and ongoing mental and emotional distress.”
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They left the hotel a week before their planned checkout date. Gutierrez and Sanchez had to seek medical care on “multiple occasions.”
Lawyer Brian J. Virag, who specializes in bedbug and other vermin lawsuits, filed the suit on behalf of the plaintiffs against the hotel owner Dario L. Pini in December 2021 in Ventura Superior Court.
Virag noted in the lawsuit that the hotel should have known about the bedbug problem based on past reviews from guests on Google and Yelp complaining about them.
“Defendant failed to disclose the material facts or warn Plaintiffs of the presence of these filthy infestations,” the lawsuit said.
The hotel violated California health and safety violations that say bedding should be kept in “a clean, dry and sanitary condition, free from filth, urine, or other foul matter, and from the infection of lice, bedbugs, or other insects,” the lawsuit said.
Plaintiffs also accused the hotel and its owner of battery.
From the suit:
Defendants did the aforementioned acts with the intent to cause a harmful or offensive contact with the bodies of Plaintiffs. Specifically, Defendants had both actual and constructive notice of the bed bugs infestation within the Premises, but intentionally, willfully and recklessly disregarded such prior knowledge and rented Plaintiffs a hotel room which was infested with bed bugs, knowing full well that Plaintiffs would get massacred by bed bugs. Defendants acted with the intent of causing, or with reckless disregard of the high probability of causing Plaintiffs to sustain harmful or offensive contact via bed bug bites all over Plaintiffs’ body.
The jury agreed. Jurors awarded Gutierrez $400,000 and Sanchez $600,000 in damages. They also awarded the plaintiffs $500,000 each in punitive damages.
But the defendants may already have grounds for an appeal. The Los Angeles Times, citing court records, reported after the verdict court officials discovered that two of the jurors may have been in the area of the hotel during the trial, which would have violated the judge’s order of not doing any personal research. One juror also allegedly told fellow members of the panel that the hotel was “an eyesore” and “should be torn down.”
Appellate attorney Wendy Lascher told the LA Times her clients are considering an appeal or moving for a mistrial or new trial.
“There’s unusual factors that go beyond the initial facts of the case,” she said.
