A week after federal agents arrested dozens of people during a military-style immigration raid of a South Shore apartment building, resident Cassandra Murray slowly inches down four flights of stairs because the elevators are broken again.
Murray is disabled and walks with a limp. The 55-year-old wears plastic gloves as she holds onto a railing, pointing out urine spots and feces smeared on the wall in the building where she has lived for a decade.
Murray is on her way to see a new apartment. She says her move wasn’t prompted by the harrowing raid or the Venezuelan immigrants who were targeted — it was the building’s long history of squalor and mismanagement.
The 130-unit complex at 7500 S. South Shore Drive is facing foreclosure, along with two other distressed South Side buildings owned by the same Wisconsin real estate investor, Trinity Flood. The city of Chicago has also sued Flood’s companies over longstanding building code violations.
Many units have been occupied by squatters. And crime in the blocks surrounding the building hasn’t fallen as fast as crime citywide has in recent years.
Murray and other residents blamed Flood and her property manager, as they painted a grim picture of life in the building before immigrants moved in over the past year and it became a flashpoint in President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation campaign in the Chicago area.
“It was a nasty mess before ICE came,” Murray said, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “So don’t nobody keep putting that s— on ICE, because that was not ICE.
“This building was a mess before the Venezuelans, when the Venezuelans [arrived] and since they’ve been gone.”
As Venezuelan immigrants with few other housing options moved into the building, some came with state rental assistance for asylum seekers and others arrived without a lease.
One was charged with murder last month in an execution-style shooting inside an apartment over the summer.
Months later, camera crews followed as hundreds of agents from a range of federal law enforcement agencies stormed the apartment complex early Sept. 30, with some rappelling onto the roof from Blackhawk helicopters.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported that 37 people were arrested. Witnesses said they saw kids separated from their mothers, and some U.S. citizens were detained for hours.
By then, city officials were well aware of the abhorrent conditions in the building but had done little that addressed the problems.
As Murray sees it, the building is “unlivable and inhumane, and it’s been that way for a while.”
Lawsuits and ‘armed occupants’
A putrid stench fills the hallways.
It’s difficult to walk through without swallowing a gnat. It’s dimly lit inside and completely dark in some corners. A stray cat roams the second floor, likely hunting the mice or cockroaches that residents say infest the building.
Trash and old belongings have piled up in units that have passed from tenant to tenant — or squatter to squatter — without being cleaned. Elevators are out of order and filled with garbage, a shopping cart and old cleaning supplies. Water pours through the ceiling of one unit, pooling below.
The city filed suit against Flood’s companies in July 2024 in Cook County over a range of code violations that highlighted the troubling conditions. City lawyers argued that a fine alone was an “inadequate remedy” and called for a series of actions, including an order to “demolish, repair, enclose or clean up” the building.
Wells Fargo bank also sued a group of companies linked to Flood in an effort to foreclose on the building and two other apartment complexes. Flood’s companies had defaulted on a loan used to buy the properties and, as of April, owed the bank more than $27 million, court records show.
A top city lawyer told attorneys for Wells Fargo in an Aug. 26 email that the current property management company, Strength In Management, had been unable to “re-assert control over the building” after it was overrun by “armed occupants” and “alleged criminal activity and shootings.”
Chicago police had responded to the June slaying in the building while an inspection was underway, Assistant Corporation Counsel Eduardo G. Martinez noted in the email. City inspectors had since been steering clear of the building “due to the safety concerns,” Martinez wrote.
The city couldn’t conduct two scheduled inspections since then “due to ownership not being present,” a spokesperson said. Inspectors were set to return again Friday.
That comes a week after Judge Debra A. Seaton ordered Strength In Management to clean up and make a range of repairs, including to the doors damaged during the raid. She indicated she wanted a new manager to take over and help sell the buildings, but she stopped short of appointing one before a court date later this month.
Blame cast on building owner, manager
The building was never perfect.
But things “took a nosedive real fast” when Strength in Management took over in mid-2024, according to Murray, and other residents agreed.
“If Strength In Management had really redid the building and did everything they were supposed to, I would not be moving,” Murray said.
Tenants said maintenance requests went ignored, and management stopped sending cleaning crews on a regular basis — or they only cleaned the first floor.
The company also chose not to employ building security. The front doors didn’t lock and swung right open, they said. Meanwhile, the unhoused population in the building grew, driven in part by immigrants.
Strength in Management filed 25 evictions against tenants and squatters last year, more than the 20 filed in the previous four years combined, records show. Most owed $900 to $1,050 in monthly rent. The landlord appeared to be short tens of thousands of dollars, including from some tenants who stopped paying amid the poor conditions.
Jonah Karsh, an organizer with the Metropolitan Tenants Organization, said a group of tenants sent a letter to Flood and Strength In Management in September 2024 asking for repairs and security to improve the building’s conditions.
In an email sent to the tenants that was reviewed by WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times, an attorney representing the owner and property manager said some problems had already been addressed, and others “are the result of the actions of the occupants of the property.”
Karsh said Flood, the out-of-town owner, bears the blame for the deteriorating conditions in the building.
“I can imagine that what was going through her mind was, ‘It’s real estate a block from the lake, and the Obama [Presidential] Center is getting built, this could be the next up-and-coming neighborhood.’ She completely misassessed the cost of doing business in that building … and the people that are paying for it are the people that live in the building,” Karsh said.
Court records show that in 2020, shortly after she purchased the property, Flood sued the previous owners alleging they sold it to her at an inflated price and that she wasn’t made aware of major issues, including that it required 24-hour security, which Flood alleges would have cost $15,000 per month.
Flood’s two other South Shore properties are also plagued with issues and failed code inspections.
Flood wouldn’t comment.
Strength in Management CEO Corey Oliver declined to respond to specific criticism from residents. A South Side native, Oliver manages about 700 units in rental properties in low-income communities on the South and West sides, according to a May interview on a Chicago real estate podcast.
Murder in the building
The Homeland Security department has said its agents targeted the apartments because they were “known to be frequented” by members and associates of Tren de Aragua, a gang that grew out of a Venezuelan prison and has been designated by the Trump administration as a terrorist organization.
The president has referenced the gang while justifying his deportation campaign and military strikes on purported drug boats in the southern Caribbean Sea — while providing little backing for his claims.
An agency spokesperson claimed that two of the people arrested in the South Shore raid were members of the gang, including one on a terror watchlist. DHS wouldn’t provide evidence showing that those detained in the raid were connected to the gang.
“We are confident in our law enforcement’s intelligence, and we aren’t going to share intelligence reports and undermine national security every time a gang member denies he is one,” the spokesperson said. “That would be insane.”
The area surrounding the building has long been impacted by crime. But the number of reported crimes in the three blocks surrounding the South Shore complex has fallen in recent years, tracking with post-pandemic trends.
This year, crime in those blocks has dropped by less than 2%, while citywide crime has decreased more than 9%. Few people have been charged with crimes that occurred at the building.
Jose Coronado-Meza, a Venezuelan man who was living in the building, was charged in the jarring murder of Gregori Arias on June 22, court records show.
Coronado-Meza, 25, and two other men allegedly dragged Arias, 32, out of an apartment as he flashed his ID and tried to explain he had no problem with them, prosecutors said. One of the men then shot Arias in the chest. As Arias begged for his life and cried out for an ambulance, Coronado-Meza allegedly pressed a gun to his head and executed him. While in jail awaiting trial in a separate gun case, Coronado-Meza admitted to the killing, telling a cellmate he “finished [Arias] off because he was annoyed by the victim’s talking after being shot the first time,” prosecutors said.
Coronado-Meza has also been charged with theft, illegal gun possession and possession of cannabis, records show. ICE lodged an arrest detainer last month with Cook County Jail, where he remains held.
Despite the brutal killing, tenants said they hadn’t seen a spike in crime or a sprawling criminal enterprise operating out of the building, as the Trump administration has suggested.
Murray said there were migrant families who had been paying rent through the state’s rental assistance program and stayed once the money ran out. She said they were trying to make the building more inhabitable, too.
“That was the Venezuelans that was starting to clean the hallways and stuff,” she said. “[It] wasn’t management.”
Recent asylum-seekers often landed in rundown buildings like the one at 7500 S. South Shore because they had very few options after living in tents or being evicted from city-run shelters last year. Many struggled to find affordable apartments with landlords who would rent to them.
More families receiving state rental assistance ended up in the 60649 ZIP code covering South Shore than any other in the city. It’s the ZIP code with the highest eviction rate in Chicago, according to a WBEZ analysis of court records. Most of the money provided through the program went to tenants who found rentals on the South Side and the West Side.
Darren Hightower, who has lived in the building for two years, said he had “never noticed any gang activities while I was there.
“I’ve seen graffiti on the walls, loud music, pets in the hallway, multiple-people-in-one-unit type activity,” he said. “But I’ve never seen anything crazy.”
He said he had repeatedly called property management and even the police about squatters, to no avail. He said he was “disgusted” that it took the raid to finally call attention to problems.
“Are y’all going to fix this building up?” he asked of the building owner.
Moving out
One week after the raid, a crew of five people worked to clean up the building.
They were erecting black accordion gates on units that had been left doorless — in some cases revealing piles of trash and, in others, an entire family’s worth of items scattered about: A Hello Kitty blanket, children’s toys, a bag of flour, high heels. The building now largely feels abandoned.
Many of the remaining tenants aren’t waiting for conditions to improve. They’re looking to start a new chapter elsewhere.
“Just being a part of this, it’s embarrassing,” said resident Pierre Davis, 35.
Dan Jones says he’s staying in the suburbs while he looks for a new place to live. A resident named Larry was on his way to see a new apartment, too.
Murray, the resident of 10 years, hurried into a friend’s car as she stripped off the gloves she used to shield herself from germs on her stairwell railing.
She was on her way to sign her new lease: “I gotta get a move on.”