Code violations follow landlord
Records reveal history of shoddy properties, quick evictions
Theodore Thompson’s personal belongings are gone. His dogs, taken. His sense of security, wavering.
The trouble started when Thompson, 53, moved into a home on Parker Street in North Little Rock at the end of July. The four-bedroom, 1,527-square-foot house had a backyard, where his two dogs, Roscoe and Zeus, could run.
Before he moved in, Thompson looked through the house quickly and alone while his future landlord, Imran Bohra, waited with the car running.
Over the next several weeks, Thompson started noticing the problems with the house — the stove caught fire the first time he used it, there was a hole under the kitchen sink where a possum had taken residence, and the bathtub wasn’t properly sealed.
All those things violate city housing codes and could lead to sanctions for the landlord. Bohra has been cited many times for code violations, but he also has a history of evicting tenants when they complain about the condition of his properties, an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette investigation found.
Thompson never got the keys to the Parker Street house because when he moved in, Bohra told him to get them from the property manager, Tommy Robinson. Despite nearly daily calls, Thompson said he never heard back from Robinson.
Robinson told a reporter he didn’t know who Thomp-
son was and had never heard from him regarding the keys.
When it came time to pay rent, Thompson asked Bohra to pick it up. He said he didn’t know where to take the money because Bohra had never given him instructions.
Thompson was reluctant to pay rent anyway on a house that he couldn’t lock, he said.
Soon Bohra taped a handwritten eviction notice to Thompson’s door, two days before the lease’s late-fee deadline.
That Sept. 3 eviction notice started a series of legal and emotional battles for Thompson that continue.
“It’s hard for me to understand how I’m not the first, and if he’s not stopped, I definitely won’t be the last,” Thompson said of his experience with Bohra.
Bohra has been a landlord in Pulaski County since at least the 1990s, newspaper archives show. The articles chronicle some of Bohra’s many code violations.
Bohra has about 150 rental properties in Pulaski County.
Court records, city documents and interviews with former and current residents show Bohra has a pattern of renting homes that aren’t safe or sanitary to people who are desperate for housing — single mothers, people on fixed incomes, people with mental illness, people who are formerly homeless.
His properties have been cited by code enforcement officers in Little Rock and North Little Rock at least 170 times since the start of 2016.
Bohra has filed unlawful-detainer lawsuits to evict at least 95 tenants since July 2017. Unlawful detainer is one of a couple of methods landlords use to evict tenants in Arkansas. It gives tenants 10 days to move out after failing to pay rent or violating a lease before the sheriff can forcibly remove them.
Being evicted by unlawful detainer also affects a tenant’s credit report and rental history.
A detainer suit also keeps the case in civil court. Arkansas is the only state that also has a criminal eviction law, which is still used in a few parts of the state.
Bohra has even appeared on an episode of Judge Judy, the long-running TV courtroom program in which former family court judge Judith Sheindlin presides over real small-claims cases.
‘CONSISTENT STORY’
Robinson, who said he’s worked for Bohra for about 29 years, said he and two other maintenance workers try to get to all of Bohra’s properties that need repairs.
He’s aware that tenants complain about them not getting fixed, he said. “I do my best,” he said. Tenants say they think Bohra intentionally ignores problems with his properties to get people to move out more quickly and justify keeping their deposits, but Robinson said Bohra has never told him to ignore a tenant’s request.
Reached by phone, Bohra declined to comment without speaking to his lawyer, but subsequent phone calls to Bohra and an email to his lawyer were not returned.
“Are these all negative about me?,” he asked when a reporter told him the article was based on experiences from former tenants. “OK, ma’am, let me talk to my lawyer.”
Bohra almost always represents himself in court for eviction cases, but in his case against Thompson, he hired Little Rock attorney Greg Alagood. A company called Entropy Inc. owns Bohra’s properties, according to public records.
When Bohra has represented himself in unlawful-detainer litigation, Robinson signs an affidavit certifying the violation prompting the eviction, and a lease is attached.
Many of the dates on the submitted leases are vague, wrong or don’t match the affidavits. In one case, filed July 18, the lease is dated Nov. 2, 2017. But the affidavit says the lease started in 2018, and the notary’s signature is dated 2015.
Another case in March states that the tenant received the notice to vacate in 2020. One lease says it was signed in “approximately 2005,” while another says “sometime in 2012.”
Bohra’s efforts to evict tenants often come before or after — within two years — of officials condemning a property or declaring it uninhabitable, court records show.
Sometimes the evictions occur more quickly.
At one property on Broadway in Little Rock, Bohra evicted a tenant July 23. Code enforcement officers found 10 life-safety issues three days later and twice — on Aug. 28 and Sept. 6 — declared the house unfit for human habitation.
At least 28 of Bohra’s properties in Little Rock and North Little Rock have been condemned or declared unfit for “human habitation,” a “public nuisance” or an unreasonable interference to the “use and enjoyment of public lands,” court records and city documents show.
Still, people with lower incomes find the properties, which often are listed for less than $600 per month, and move in with promises of problems getting fixed, said attorney Amy Pritchard.
Pritchard, who specializes in housing matters, calls Bohra a “slumlord on steroids” because his practices are extreme. She says similar things may be happening on a smaller scale throughout Little Rock.
“He finds very vulnerable people and convinces them to move into houses, a lot of them that [the code enforcement agency] has condemned or that are not livable,” said Pritchard, who represented Thompson in his eviction lawsuit.
Bohra “takes a security deposit or makes promises to repair and then people move in, and the places are completely uninhabitable.
“It seems like a pretty consistent story people are telling.”
RENTING AS-IS
After Thompson’s initial walk-through on Parker Street, he said Bohra drove him to a KFC restaurant where he signed the lease.
He said he asked for the place to be fixed up and whether he could rent to own. Bohra agreed that he would provide a new contract for rent-to-own, but said he was renting it “as-is” at $500 a month, Thompson said.
Bohra then asked about Thompson’s income — he gets $750 a month as a disability check. Bohra dug into the reasons for the disability check and learned that Thompson has depression and bipolar disorder. Thompson signed the lease July 27.
On Sept. 8, five days after the notice to vacate was posted, two men knocked on Thompson’s door. One brandished a long knife and threatened to “cut your head off,” according to a North Little Police Department report.
Thompson said the men told him they were friends with his landlord and wanted him to leave the house.
Floyd Jump, a 53-year-old from North Little Rock, was later arrested and pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and terroristic threatening for the incident.
The details of the incident and other interactions between Thompson and Bohra are outlined in a civil lawsuit Thompson filed against Bohra on Tuesday.
“He’s got a habit of scaring people off, and I’ve seen that,” Thompson said. “I’m not going to let you intimidate me like that.”
According to other former and current residents of Bohra’s properties and a recorded phone conversation obtained by the newspaper that Bohra left a tenant, he has made other threats. He’s told tenants that he “knows a lot of people,” to stop asking for inspections or risk eviction, and stating he was an electrician with the ability to burn a house down.
On Sept. 13, Thompson called the code enforcement agency about conditions at the Parker Street address. The ensuing report included 23 code violations with an order to fix the problems by Oct. 15. The violations involved nearly every part of the house, including the leaking roof, nonworking windows and rotted bathroom walls.
Four days after code enforcement officers visited, someone dropped off paperwork on Thompson’s doorstep, informing him he was being served with an unlawful-detainer lawsuit. Thompson got help from Pritchard in the case.
Code enforcement officials returned in October after a North Little Rock Animal Control officer stopped at the house and emailed the
code enforcement office to let inspectors know that Thompson was living without water or electricity, according to documents obtained through Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.
The animal control unit later took Thompson’s dogs, he said, because they had gotten out of the house.
The dogs are emotional-support animals, Thompson said. Thompson’s sister, with whom he’d been living, was tired of them staying at her place before he found Bohra’s house.
“I was in a position where I really had to get my dogs safe,” Thompson said. He calls the animals his reason to live and said he used to cook them dinner every night rather than serving them dog food.
On Dec. 21, Thompson went to the courthouse to file a response to the unlawful-detainer lawsuit. When he returned to the Parker Street house, he saw a U-Haul truck pulling away with all of his belongings in it.
Robinson was driving it, he said, and Bohra was following in his car.
“He [Bohra] does that sometimes when there’s a notice that they have been evicted, and it’s been a certain number of days,” Robinson told the newspaper.
Although the notice had been posted on Thompson’s door, he says the eviction case was not final when his belongings were removed.
“Christmas got real hard,” Thompson said, his voice quivering. It was his first Christmas in seven years without the dogs, and as he sat in his new, empty apartment, he said he started drinking, although he’s been sober for years.
Thompson said this month that he’s stable again, after a stint at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where he stayed after the drinking binge.
‘DOESN’T MATTER TO THEM’
Tawania Nooner, her daughter and Nooner’s seven grandchildren were supposed to stay three days in a Motel 6 while Bohra prepared a house for her family.
Nooner had found Bohra’s place, three bedrooms on Eagle Drive, while driving around looking for a cheaper place to rent. Nooner is a home nurse, but hadn’t been working for a few weeks while she cared for her mother, who died in October from stomach cancer.
Bohra’s place was about $300 less per month than her previous residence.
The short motel stay that began Aug. 2 stretched into a month, two months, then five months.
Finally, Nooner, 44, signed the lease for a three-bedroom house on Aug. 2.