A year ago, Jeffrey Allan Taylor, a 50-year-old disabled Army veteran, found himself homeless after a faulty background check wrongly labeled him a child molester and he was denied housing just days after leaving a Houston hospital.
Now, Taylor is suing the company that issued the background check, calling their background research malicious in its carelessness.
Taylor, had recently gotten out of the hospital after a two month stay, brought on by complications from diabetes. He had lost his left foot, was newly in a wheelchair and was looking for a place to live.
"He went to go get a spot in a veteran's hospice run by Cloudbreak Communities in Midtown," said Marc Nolan, Taylor's attorney. "They did a background check on him through RealPage, and the RealPage report wrongly stated that he had been convicted of indecent liberties in the state of Virginia."
"I don't know if you've ever been accused of being a child molester or sex offender, but it's a pretty awful moment. He was protesting his innocence and they were like 'sure you're innocent.'"
But Taylor was innocent. He is now suing the background check company, RealPage Inc., for defamation per se, and is seeking $1 million plus in damages.
Upon filing the lawsuit, the error was fixed, and Taylor now lives at the apartments, located at 4000 Travis. But before the fix, he was homeless, turned away "in his wheelchair with a medical pump still sucking out the liquid discharge draining from the stump of his leg," according to the lawsuit.
Taylor ended up at Harmony House, a homeless shelter at 602 Girard Street.
According to Rhett Butler, vice president of investor relations at RealPage, the bulk of the information which goes into their background reports comes from the courts, the information from the courts varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and the court documents don't have social security numbers. He said the reports aren't perfect, and they do the best they can to match up information accurately. ..Continued.. by Henry Sturm
No comments:
Post a Comment