Location: California. Hi everyone, I’m making a police report later today as some items are still missing but this has been insane. For some background I am in a college apartment owned by a private company that is on university property and I am in California. My roomate has moved out for summer but signed another one year lease and my leaseends tomorrow, August 30th but until this point I still had stuff in the unit as I have been in the process of moving out. So the unit is vacant but items are still there.
On August 18th, I shut the power off in my apt since I am moving out and asked my roomate to turn it back on so that the items still in the fridge would not spoil. Unfortunately he forgot which is not entirely his fault because I probably should not have gone about turning it off the way I did.
On August 25th, my boyfriend entered the apartment to move our groceries over and found everything had been spoiled past the point of a simple cleaning. I called my leasing office to ask if there was anything they could do for me and told them I took complete responsibility and would pay for any repairs or to replace the fridge. They then asked if they could throw out any spoiled food and I gave them consent to do what they needed to do. Mind you I still had six days left on my lease and told them I was still in the process of moving out since there were boxes and personal items still downstairs.
fast forward to August 27th, I enter the unit to find a complete mess, I didn’t take a lot of pictures initially because I thought I could clean it but I was unable to do so and called my parents and roomate and after they saw what happened they told me to stop cleaning and take pictures. They had spilled the sludge from the fridge everywhere, left dirty rags everywhere, destroyed some of my personal cleaning supplies, taken my trash can out of my unit, and used cat diapers to soak up the sludge and left it on the ground. The fridge was out of the unit at this time but they had not cleaned the mess that they made while removing it. At this point. I went on yelp and hired a professional cleaner to do a deep clean because my lease was about to end and I knew I wouldn’t have time to take care of it myself. On August 28th, I noticed some items were missing and assumed my boyfriend and my new roomate had taken them to our new place when they were helping me move but when my new roomate went to check his trunk of tools that we had left in the unit was emptied of all of his tools and filled with my clothes and his pc was gone, at this time I had no reason to suspect anything else was missing but this was 2,000+ worth of items so I called my leasing office again and they told me they would look into it.
On the 29th I realized ALOT of items were missing along with my social security card, my boyfriend’s registration, and some other items. I called and told the leasing office if this was not resolved I would have to get the police involved. They told me they thought they found some of my items and today when I went in they presented me with two carts full of my stuff but there are still items missing, they found my social security card but the pc is still missing,some of my shoes are missing, and some of the power tools are still missing. They told me that an employee pf theirs misunderstood when they told them to remove the spoiled food from my fridge and though they wanted them to remove everything from my unit but this makes no sense as there were many worthless items left in my unit and most of the things they took were items of value. Why did they keep my items if this employee beleived that they needed to be thrown out? Where is the pc that was taken?? Only maintenance had been in my unit for the past three weeks before this incident so who knows when these items were even taken. All I know is my lease is active until tomorrow so why would they even think my unit was vacant, I beleive they violated multiple renter laws and want them to be held accountable.
How should I proceed legally because they are saying they may not be able to refund us for the items that are still missing and when I told them my estimated cost to replace everything would be over 1,000 they seemed unease. Something weird here is going on and I don’t know how to proceed, thank you for your help.
TLDR: maintenance removed items from my unit during a maintenance request because they beleived my unit was vacant after I told them I was still in the process of moving out. They gave back some of the items but were not able to find all of them and I beleive they were stolen, what do I do now?