Couple awarded $4.6M after home is vandalized by ex-tenant

<snip>

A judge has awarded a Seaford couple $4.6 million in punitive and other damages several years after their home was vandalized by a former tenant whose romantic advances were rejected by the wife.

Nassau County District Court Judge David A. Gross called the incident, which he said happened several years ago, "a horrible and vicious thing" that caused trouble in the couple's marriage.

The former tenant, Frank Stalzer, "wrote things on the wall to suggest that the person who did it was the husband's jilted lover," Gross said yesterday evening in an interview from his home. "He basically tried to get the whole community to believe that the husband was having an affair ... when the husband didn't have a lover."

Stalzer confessed to flooding the house by turning on faucets, rifling through an underwear drawer and fouling the couple's bed, Gross said, and served prison time for the vandalism.

Stalzer, a former tenant in the two-family home of Edward and Lori Ahrens, had twice asked Lori Ahrens to meet him privately, which she declined, Gross said. He did the damage while the couple was in Arkansas.

Gross awarded the couple $1 million for emotional distress, $3 million for punitive damages, $100,000 for the loss of six family photo albums and $500,000 for loss of consortium.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-litene113925647aug11,0,2504378,print.story?coll=ny-topstories-headlines

Winning a judgement is one thing, collecting is another... glad to see they got justice, 'tho.