Location: Texas
A little over a month ago our roommate/landlord took our portion of the rent ($898), gave us a week to find a new place to live and left town. This essentially left us homeless and forced me to have to keep my mother in a facility she was supposed to be in for short-term physical rehabilitation, which doctors have told me likely caused a decline in her mental and physical health. This has caused extreme financial and emotional stress on my family.
There was emotional distress while we lived there and the living conditions were hazardous and unsafe. We did not have a lease agreement with her, we weren’t on the original lease, pretty much everything was a verbal agreement. She kept trying to change the rent amount after we moved in. My mother would pay the rent using her disability check through cashapp, which she instructed us to send to her boyfriend (we would list the payment for her as rent). We paid $1,796 for June and July but we were in the hospital with my mother from June 19th until July 15th. She informed us she was moving out of state on July 16th and we were out of the house by July 26th. We left a few days early due to threats of her kicking us out for not responding to her messages fast enough. There is strong reason to believe that she rented to someone after we left, before she left town. She also anonymously called the facility my mother was at, told them we were being displaced and to keep my mother there (the facility called me directly after and told me because she was not authorized to talk to them).
The more I’ve looked at the situation the more it seems she didn’t want us to continue living with us because she believed my mother’s health issues to be a liability for her and she intentionally let us know last minute that she would be moving so we would pay her rent again (which funded her moving costs).
I have evidence of everything I’ve mentioned as well as evidence she didn’t give us any 30 day notice to vacate and that she agreed to pay a small portion of rent back to us for the days that everyone (including her) was supposed to be out the house, but as of right now she hasn’t returned any of my calls or messages since August 1st. She is completely ignoring us and has started to rent rooms to other people again through Airbnb.
I’m contacting a lawyer tomorrow to get a consultation but I’m trying to figure out is it actually possible to sue her and how likely is it that we would legally be able to recover at least the full amount for July rent that we paid?