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Wrong tenant evicted in Jacksonville, apartment management blames worker

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The company accused of wrongfully evicting a local student from her apartment told Action News Jax it was a mistake and blames a former maintenance worker for it.

Action News Jax first told you last week about Brianna Davis, who said she came home to an empty apartment at Arlington Eagle and found that almost everything she owned had been thrown in the dumpster.

On Monday evening, we interviewed a former maintenance man for Arlington Eagle who said he was told to clear Davis' apartment, and then was asked to lie about it by management. He said he refused and he was fired.

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Now the company is disputing those claims from that former employee, saying he was fired because of a separate incident.

"As far as him trashing out the wrong apartment or me giving him the wrong apartment, that never happened. You had that apartment on a list to check to see if someone was still living there,” Lance Young, Arlington Eagle’s maintenance manager, said

“He told me at the time when he walked to the apartment that the door was kicked in. He then looked inside and said the sliding glass door was open and there was stuff all over the place,” Young said.

Johanne Brouard, chief operating officer of the apartment company that owns Arlington Eagle, said the company will change its protocol moving forward to make sure this doesn’t happen to another tenant.

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“We are doing a double check now. The manager has to go to the apartment, and also the supervisor has to go to the apartment before anything gets trashed out," Brouard said.

Brouard also said, “We have been contacted by her attorney and we are just going to give her what she asked for. We feel very upset that this happened to her."