Where do I even begin - my boyfriend and I moved into Union in June of 2017, and we had been house hunting for weeks with no luck considering the time of year. We had limited time to make a move and we came across Union after driving by multiple times and decided to check it out. We explained our urgency and found ourselves in luck that there was a 2 bedroom that was available for immediate move-in. We enjoyed living in the complex and had few complaints apart from the loud AC in the living room, the white floors in the bathrooms and laundry room that are impossible to keep clean, and paper thin walls - other than that, we were pretty content.
Fast forward to May of 2018, when a documentary on Crime Watch Daily aired that was a special about the Las Vegas couple that was murdered in October of 2016 in the Union Apartments - we'd heard about the story briefly and had seen it mentioned in reviews of the complex, but we didn't know the unit where it had happened, because logically no one would be living in it, right? Wrong - come to find out that we had been living in the unit where a young couple was brutally murdered just 9 months prior to us moving in, execution style, right in our bedroom where we had been sleeping for almost a year. About a month and a half before the documentary aired, my boyfriend noticed a film crew filming in front of our building. We figured it had something to do with what had happened, and just assumed it was the unit downstairs that had been empty for a while.
Let me just tell you how horrifying it was to see the crime scene photos that were included in the documentary - 3 feet of blood and handprints that were splattered on the wall in the master bedroom, the same wall that our bed laid against, in the same apartment where we'd gone on living happily for almost a year. Even the corner where it happened looked screwed up like it was very sloppily put back together - we just chocked it up to lazy Vegas maintenance. What baffled us most was the fact that no one said a word - Nevada law stipulates that such incidents do not have to be disclosed to renters - only if there was once a meth lab or lead paint. Okay fine, but this was not just a natural death, this was a brutal double homicide and not to mention still an open case, and any leasing agent with a conscious or even a shred of common sense would have said "hey, just a heads up," not in this case.
To say we were furious would be an understatement, oh, and they also claimed to have no idea that a film crew had been onsite filming - you know, just violating resident privacy, etc. Right up front we demanded that they let us out of our lease and refund our money - because what person in their right mind would agree to sign a 13-month lease with that kind of knowledge about unit? As you'd expect they refused to refund us anything, instead they went the typical route and tried to offer us another unit, and then floated the idea of possibly paying for moving fees. They didn't even bother to watch the documentary links that we forwarded them - you know, the ones that clearly show the unit, the number is photo shopped out but the evidence is undeniable.
Needless to say, there was a complete lack of effort from management to make the situation right, a situation that we never asked to be in. After going back and forth, trying to reach the property manager to get a straight answer - I even asked to speak with the regional property manager directly, the person who the PM actually gets direction from, to get things moving, she never bothered to contact me regardless of how many times I asked. It wasn't until I had an attorney get involved that they decided to respond, and all they came back with was either transfer to a new unit or terminate the lease without paying fees. They even had the nerve to say our concerns were "alleged," and let me be clear - anyone can say "I can only imagine how you feel," and that would be right, "imagine" being the key word because what were living in was a nightmare.
The unit has been since been re-listed as available for rent, which is unbelievable. No one should be subjected to living there, it is disturbing on so many levels and just wrong. The right thing to do would be to turn the unit into the sample show apartment. Surely, they still won't disclose this info to the next unsuspecting tenants, so if you are looking at Union make sure you ask which specific unit the brutal murders happened in, before they put you in that unit. The link to part 1 of the Crime Watch Daily documentary has been included below. I warned the folks in the leasing office that they probably didn't want this to become a bigger issue that turns into a PR nightmare, and that this wasn't going to go away and that people were going to find out, but they brought this on themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5DADMqv2j0&lc=z23btlmo3umuz13nnacdp432rrom0ibylewgcdq3pahw03c010c.1530033311158927&feature=em-comments