Palisades Rathouse: Unchallenged by Health Officials, Elderly Twins Fed Local Vermin Population

On the Alphabet streets, Rico has a virtual monopoly of 50 clients — none so memorable as Natalie Garner. Rico recalled in his court deposition that when he first met Garner, in July 2005, she was frantic, telling him, “I’m seeing hundreds of rodents outside my house.” But despite Rat Busters’ efforts, when Rico visited the property a second time, he saw twice as many rats.

The rat exterminator soon cracked the code,a discovery that would make most Angelenos’ skin crawl. The exploding rat population was being purposely fed. Rico, peeking through the overgrown hedge, spotted rats eating and drinking from pie tins full of dog food and milk. To his shock, sisters Margaret and Marjorie stood there, observing approvingly.

Illustration by Chris Rahn

Max Taves

Horror house: The day the mop-up man arrived, exterminators removed multiple bags of dead rats.

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“They were standing there watching them,” Rico tells L.A. Weekly. “I was like, ‘Whoa!’ That’s something a person doesn’t forget. I have never seen it before, and I have never seen it since. That’s something you never forget.”

But Rico, afraid of getting in the middle of an ugly Palisades homeowner war, did not tell the Denhams these facts. Nor did he tell them that in late 2006, Garner insisted he remove his bait stations because the Barthel sisters were furious over the rat poisonings and the possible threat to other animals. How dare Garner slaughter their beautiful brood?

“The sellers disclosed nothing” of this, said the Denhams’ real estate agent, Elizabeth Stein, late last year, referring to Garner and uppercrust Sotheby’s International Realty.

A week after Rat Busters responded, when the Denhams had lived there about two weeks, two county vector-control inspectors — Amy Okohira and Briccio Malaguit — finally arrived at the Barthel home. They didn’t exactly need MapQuest to find the house either.

Okohira and other health inspectors, it turned out, had been to the house many times. Nobody knows how many times, because in Los Angeles County, the Vector Management Program throws away all such records after two years, says Terrance Powell, director of the department’s militaristically-named Special Operations Bureau.

“We don’t erase stuff,” Powell tells L.A. Weekly. “We just don’t have room. We throw it away. Consider this: We do more than half a million inspections a year of various types. Where do you think we would keep that kind of bulk [of] records?”

Digitally? “Well, that’s a good one. That could work,” Powell concedes.

Still, two surviving county records from 2004 obtained by L.A. Weeklyfortuitously avoided the shredder — records the county failed to release for several months, and which the Denhams never knew existed.

The complaints are both chilling and infuriating. One reads: “Rats coming from senior citizen twins’ [house].” Two months later, it gets more alarming: “Rats in the neighbors’ house. They feed them and state they cannot kill these rodents. Please talk to other neighbor on the opposite side of [redacted]. Please call him ...”

In the first record from 2004, Okohira reported seeing a lone rat on the Barthels’ ramshackle roof, but noted that the house’s walls had a lot of “rub marks.” Rats have dirty fur; when they move along walls and through cracks, they leave behind oily, sootlike smudges. The Barthels’ outside walls were covered in greasy rat-fur smears — evidence of a huge infestation.

Inspector Okohira warned the sisters, who ventured outside to meet her, that they were in violation of the health code. But as the Barthels had often done with county inspectors in the past, they easily got rid of them by claiming they had already contacted a pest-control company.

Several days after the county “inspection,” something happened that unhinged Liz Denham. The morning after Halloween, the Denhams’ maid caught six rats eating leftover crumbs — in their 4-month-old’s stroller.

The baby was safe elsewhere. The stroller had been left out in the yard. But the incident badly rattled Liz. Although the Denhams were careful to spell out R-A-T, 4-year-old Alex soon caught on that something was wrong with mommy and daddy’s new house. Alex’s new preschool teacher kept journals of each child, and Scott Denham recalls how the teacher wrote that Alex kept repeating: “My mommy and daddy are scared. I’m afraid [rats] are going to eat my toys.”

Denham can barely stand thinking about it. “The kid just moved from a new city. He doesn’t know anybody, and this is what he’s telling his teacher in the first week of school!” He became something of an unofficial lobbyist, trying to find a Los Angeles city or county bureaucrat who gave a damn. He never found one.

“My wife and I are very nice people normally,” Scott recalled last year to the Weekly. “But here we are cursing and threatening people with lawsuits. I’ve turned into this negative and angry person. ... Who is protecting us?”

Before he went before civic leaders at the Palisades Community Council last October, where their concerns focused on a drugstore sign, Denham had called many city and county departments and politicians — including County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky’s office and Councilman Bill Rosendahl’s office — multiple times. He demanded that the local newspaper, the Palisadian-Post, write about the rat epidemic, then abruptly demanded that the paper not print the story until he and Liz had exhausted their options.