BY: Melissa Bailey Jan 19, 2011

Melissa Guffey and her loved ones huddled at the Omni Hotel after escaping a dangerous living situation at Church Street South that the feds deemed safe—even as city inspectors chased after the landlord to eliminate a deadly carbon monoxide threat.

Guffey, who’s 23, was holed up at the Omni Tuesday afternoon with her son, Jariel, and her boyfriend, Ivan Cortes, 23 (pictured). They were hiding out from the freezing rain falling outside—and from living conditions that twice forced them out of their home at DeDiego Court, a 12-unit wing of the Church Street South housing complex.

They are three of 26 people who remained displaced from the housing complex after a poorly installed furnace leaked dangerous levels of carbon monoxide into the air Saturday evening, sending four adults and one child to the hospital. They returned home but were again displaced on Monday, as the city inspected all the furnaces to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again.

Their dislocation caps several months of communications between the city and the property owners over code violations at the site—violations that were apparently overlooked by federal inspectors, who gave the complex a passing grade in a Sept. 20 inspection.

A few months earlier on July 21, city inspectors did their own review and gave failing grades to 48 apartments for a wide range of problems.

City Spotted Deadly Dangers Feds Gave OK

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