news story / By Heidi Walters

Tenants’ rights, postmortem

A woman claims Floyd Squires gave her one day to clear out her deceased sister’s apartment

(March 13, 2008)  Wanda Taylor, 51, died unexpectedly on Wednesday Feb. 27, on her bed inside her apartment — No. 5, at 607 Summer Street in Eureka. Later that night, Taylor’s sister, Barbara Mitchell, received the news by telephone from their brother Michael.

Mitchell lives in Orick. The rest of the family lives elsewhere in California and in other states. So it fell to Mitchell to take care of initial details — a difficult position for anyone to be in. But according to Mitchell, her sister’s landlords, Floyd and Betty Squires — a couple infamous in Eureka for their low-rent and often trouble-ridden apartments — didn’t make things any easier. On the morning after her sister’s death, says Mitchell, Floyd Squires told her she had to clear out her sister’s apartment that very day.

Barbara Mitchell has kept a daily journal of her experience in dealing with the aftermath of her sister’s death. Photo by Heidi Walters

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The Squires deny this. Floyd Squires, by phone last Thursday, said that Mitchell indicated she wanted to clear out the apartment immediately, and so he hired two workers to help her. “There was no reason she couldn’t have taken longer,” he said.

But suppose Mitchell’s claim is true — did the Squires break the law? And, even if not, where’s the compassion for a grieving family?

Last Thursday, Mitchell sat at her desk at a podiatry office in Arcata, where she’s the office manager and podiatry assistant, and told her story.

Taylor, Mitchell said, was her half-sister, although as close as a sister can be. Her sister had mental problems, she said, which increased after Taylor’s dad died some years ago. “She loved to do decoupage. She was always telling me stories and stuff I knew were not true. She had these imaginations. And she was loaded with tattoos on her arms. But each one of them had meanings for her. She said we were related to Willie Nelson.”

Taylor also had severe neck pain — an old injury from her paramedic days, for which she took prescribed Vicodin. She wasn’t working anymore and survived on Social Security checks.

Mitchell had talked to her on the phone two days before she died. “She had been sick the week before with a real bad cough,” said Mitchell. “She called me on Monday — she’d given me a knife set, and she wanted to know if I liked it. And I told her I loved it, because it was in different colors. She sounded a little bit better.”

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