Larry Freeman fetched the family’s laundry from a picnic table. Radonna Fox, his wife, tended to Larry II, their 3-year-old, who was stirring awake in the back seat of the Ford Ranger. Alerich, 2, frolicked nearby in the dirt of the campsite.
It was Monday. For them, moving day.
Everyone was again in relatively good health, though the large welts caused by the rash on Radonna’s right arm still oozed some, and Larry, who’d lost 20 pounds since it all started, still has no real appetite.
The boys, too, can breathe again.
The couple insists the family was sentenced to this dusty patch in the Indian Paintbrush campground of Bear Creek Lake Park by their landlord, forced to live for most of the past two weeks inside a small tent.
Their real home, a rented double- wide mobile home in a place called Mountainside Estates at 17190 Mount Vernon Road, No. 181, Golden, is so badly contaminated with toxic black tar and other mold that it briefly hospitalized Radonna Fox.
It began in the middle of the night in mid-September when Larry, on his way to the rest room, stumbled on and kicked one of the boys’ toy castles. It opened a hole in the base of a wall.
Larry attempted to patch it. The boys went after the patch and reopened the hole, from which black mold began oozing.
The effects were immediate: The boys developed breathing problems and bloody noses. Everyone had migraine headaches. A rash moved up Radonna’s right arm.
Radonna, studying for a master’s degree in psychology at Regis University, began researching it on the Internet. Black tar mold, it told her. A $325 inspection they paid for confirmed it.
The couple left the house Sept. 25 after Radonna was hospitalized and never went back.
They went to management of Mountainside Estates to inform them of the problem. The couple says it never received a response. Neither has their attorney, Brian Stutheit of Centennial.
Reached by telephone for an interview, Esther Rivera, manager of Mountainside Estates, declined to discuss the matter, saying it is against company policy to say anything about a tenant.
“I was hoping they would understand and just move us to the vacant trailer directly across the street. It was the right thing to do,” Radonna Fox said.
With no family in town, Larry grabbed the family’s tent and set it up at Bear Creek Lake Park.
Last weekend, Larry raised enough cash to purchase a 20-by-8-foot, 1977 Great Divide camper trailer.
It is safer and warmer for the kids, said the couple, both 41.
Radonna has withdrawn from Regis and decided the family will pull the trailer to Brewster, Kan., where her parents live. It will give them time, she said, to regroup and decide what to do next.
“Maybe this is life in America now, where people can just treat you like trash and never say why,” said Larry Freeman, who had spent the previous hours putting the family’s belongings into storage.
When he arrived at the front door of the mobile home, he said, he found attached to it a final indignity: an eviction notice.
It was signed by Esther Rivera, who still has not responded once to the couple.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
