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the court determined defendant would be asserting the defenses that the case was brought in
retaliation to defendant complaining about her unit’s state of disrepair (see Civ. Code,
§ 1942.5), and because the action was based upon acts of domestic violence.
Testimony
Christine Singleton, who lived directly across defendant’s apartment in a four-unit
complex in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles, was the only witness called by plaintiff to
prove the nuisance described in the three-day notice. Singleton testified she moved into her
apartment in 2017, and defendant, along with her teenage son, two young children, and Will
resided in the nearby apartment.
Each unit had a single parking spot assigned to it, and Singleton claimed that, starting in
2018, “I had problems with them parking in my property, and requesting them to move their
vehicles. Blocking the driveway, making it hard to take my vehicle out and into the property.”
Defendant and Will would also sometimes park without permission in other tenants’ spots.
Both Will and defendant would park in her spot or block in her car, and she repeatedly had to
ask them to move their vehicles. On one occasion, her car was vandalized, but she did not
know who had caused the damage. Defendant’s boyfriend, Oscar Quesada (Oscar), started
coming to the location in January, one month after Will moved out, and Oscar would
sometimes also park in Singleton’s spot.
Singleton maintained Will had a white van, and she would often see “vagrant looking
people, homeless looking people, people who look like addicts, go into the white van, and they
would stay in there. . . . [T]here was weird smells coming out of the van [sic]. So they were
doing drugs. Sometimes we would find spoons, burned spoons, in the parking structure.”
On five or six occasions, Singleton saw the people who had been in the van going in and out of
defendant’s apartment unit. One time, Singleton saw “someone drive up to the driveway,
knock on the window, and exchange . . . money for a bag,” leading her to suspect someone in
defendant’s apartment unit had sold drugs to the person. When Will left the location he took
his van, but Singleton continued to see persons associated with defendant in the apartment
complex area who she suspected were “drug addicts.”