The owners of an illegal five-bedroom Mattituck rental home that was housing 13 people when it was destroyed in a devastating fire last fall — killing a young Guatemalan immigrant — have been slapped with town code violations over a different illegal rental home at the same site.
Last week, a Southold Town ordinance inspector sought and received consent from the tenants to inspect a four-bedroom home at 12505 Sound Ave., and issued violations for a lack of fire safety equipment and for failing to secure a rental permit, according to public records requests.
The inspection found a working smoke detector in only one of the four bedrooms and none had working carbon monoxide detectors. There were no fire extinguishers in the home, according to the report.
One of the tenants acted as a translator between the inspector and the other tenants, the records show, but it remains unclear how many people had been living in the home. No one answered the door at the location on Monday.
The property where the house burned down — which is also occupied by Amagansett Building Materials — is owned by Long Island-based 12585 Sound LLC, town assessor’s office records show. The limited liability company bought the property from George Penny in 2020 for $2.4 million.
An attorney representing the LLC said this week that the home at 12505 Sound Ave. is no longer being rented out and that the safety violations have been addressed.
“As far as the smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors and so forth, that’s all been remediated, and there’s no longer any tenants in the house,” said Christian Killoran, a Remsenburg-based lawyer. “Presently, the owners are not intending on re renting the property.”
Mr. Killoran said he did not know how many people had been previously living in the home or for how long.
The rental home that burned down was also operating without a rental permit. Last fall, a town building department official said Southold has no property records for the homes, likely because they were built before 1957, when zoning was first enacted in Southold.
No certificate of occupancy has ever been sought or issued for the homes — a prerequisite for getting a rental permit that would have triggered safety inspections.
The cause of the November fire remains undetermined, but residents who escaped the burning structure said they had been renting there for eight years, and had frequently complained about needed repairs, including electrical work, but that no action was ever taken.
“We always asked him to tell the owner of the house to fix some things, because there was electrical [problems] that were going on in the house,” Mattituck High School graduate Erick Morales, who pulled his mother and young cousin from the burning building, said last fall. “The house was really old — it needed to be paid attention to. It needed to be looked at, but he would never do it.”
The former high school soccer star said his family paid cash rent to a landlord who would come by two days before the end of each month to collect.
“It was always cash,” he said. “We asked if we could Zelle him so we had proof [of payment], but he said, ‘No.’ He wanted cash.” Efforts to reach the landlord have been unsuccessful.
Mr. Morales said last fall that he was certain that the fire started in the building’s basement, that “the flames were going up through the first floor” and that he could see a hole burned through the first floor with orange flames licking at its edges.
He said that having 13 people living in the house was only temporary, and that four of the residents had been scheduled to move to another Mattituck home soon after the fire.
About a month before the fire, his mother took in her sister and three children, who had just arrived from Guatemala, until they could get on their feet. He said that former C.J.’s American Grill dishwasher Edy Herrera, who also came from Guatemala, arrived in town about two years earlier, and had been living with the Morales family ever since. Mr. Herrera died in the fire.
Ian Wilder, executive director of the non-profit housing advocacy group Long Island Housing Services, said the problem is less an issue of pre-zoned housing than it is about illegal rentals driven by an intractable island-wide affordable housing crisis.
“There’s no easy way for a town to know a property is rented illegally, and that’s regardless of whether it was built last year or in 1957,” said Mr. Wilder, a former real estate attorney. “People are living in unfinished basements or attics or in illegally divided-up properties that were built last year.”
In an interview on Monday, three months after the fire, Mr. Morales said that he and his family are recovering.
“We’re doing good so far. We’re just working and trying to get back on our feet, but so far, we’re good. I appreciate the community so much for all their help. They really mean a lot to me and I, when I’m older, I want to give back to them and everyone who helped me and my family.”
Two years before his death at age 26, Mr. Herrera left Guatemala and entered the U.S., determined — his friends said — to support his mother back in Quezaltepeque, an agricultural town about 110 miles east of Guatemala City.
The dish washing gig was his first staff job with CJ’s, though he’d worked various day jobs for the eatery over the past two years, owner Joanne Richards said last fall. The restaurant’s two chefs are Mr. Herrera’s cousins. Before he died, at his request, she said, she gave him extra shifts to work.
Mr. Herrera was a devout Christian who was often sought out to create memorial tributes when other members of the North Fork’s Guatemalan community passed away, his friends said. He was meticulous with details and particularly fond of white flowers, especially white roses.
Mr. Morales said Mr. Herrera’s memory lives on in his many friends and family in the U.S. and in Guatemala.
“Everyone’s doing okay, I guess,” he said, “but his mom — it’s hard for her because he was her only child. So we’re going to try and support his mom and make sure that she lives a nice life. We’re going to make sure that she has everything she needs.”