Ohio State University Sued by Parents of Freshmen Over Dangerous Dorm Conditions

Race Day Live (New Jersey) – The parents of more than 30 Ohio State University undergraduate freshman have filed a lawsuit against the school for what they claim are dangerous conditions in one of the dorms.

According to the complaint, Lawrence Tower is a “toxic time bomb” that is causing student inhabitants to become ill from mold.

According to the lawsuit, parents who paid a premium for superior apartments in Lawrence Tower discovered that their children developed coughs, cognitive fog, and respiratory issues immediately after moving in. The facility had formerly been a Holiday Inn Express hotel, which the school purchased and converted into a dormitory in 2009. It contains around 130 rooms, each containing one to four pupils.

Residents paid $5,045 per semester to live at Lawrence Tower, which was more than $1,000 more than the similar fee in other dormitories.

“University officials knew the renovations should have taken two years, but were inexplicably completed in only two months,” said the filing, which alleged that mold and asbestos issues were rampant on the property.

“Mushrooms began growing out of Lawrence Tower walls,” said the plaintiffs, whose complaint included pictures. They asserted that students began to notice that wallpaper separated from the walls to reveal black, yellow, and purple mold.

Plaintiffs claimed that when they brought the conditions to the notice of university administrators, they were told that the problem was due to a single leak. However, parents conducted their own mold testing and reported that the majority of rooms had poor air quality.

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The university declined to comment on pending lawsuit, referring Law&Crime to a statement issued in late November. According to the statement, the university is performing air-quality tests at Lawrence Tower and that an initial examination suggests that most rooms are “within the expected range” for air quality, but that “out of an abundance of caution,” it has hired a mold remediation expert.

The university has evicted students from the Lawrence Tower dorms during the spring semester in order to “minimize further disruptions to their student experience and facilitate ongoing renovations.”

“The university takes environmental health and safety seriously and has comprehensive safety and service protocols for its more than 1,300 buildings, including residence halls,” according to a statement from the college. “These robust systems include multiple channels for reporting and responding to health and safety concerns, as well as standard processes for communicating about maintenance and upkeep to building occupants and engaging outside experts to assist with this work when needed.”

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The complaint seeks unspecified damages totaling no less than $6,000 per plaintiff.

“They don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” said the plaintiffs’ attorney, Jedidiah Bressman. “This is hopefully a once in lifetime thing that Ohio State will have to deal with and then they will fix the issue and everything will be fine.”

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