Walk into Judy Vickers' apartment and you'll notice some uncommon areas on her ceiling. They include a tub sticking down into her bathroom.
It all started a few months ago when Vickers contacted property managers.
"I called them and told them it's just unusual noises in my ceiling, mostly above the dining room table," she said.
Vickers recorded the noises on her phone.
At first, she said her apartment managers didn't do anything. When the night time noises became worse, Vickers would sometimes sleep in her car.
At her wits' end, she demanded action. Two weeks ago, a man finally came out and found the problem.
"First thing he did is he went up on the roof and he came down and he said, 'Well, you've got raccoons,'" Vickers said.
In the last two weeks, an animal control expert caught a mother raccoon, four or five of her babies and at last check was still trying to catch at least one other raccoon above the apartment ceiling.
He caught them by cutting holes in Vickers' ceiling to set up traps. But it made her situation worse.
"The hair and the dander, everything just came right down," Vickers said. "In at least the first hour, I had my first asthma attack."
Vickers spoke to the 41 Action News Investigators with a mask on her face in the apartment she's now leaving.
Armed with a note from her doctor who said she couldn't live there due to health concerns, she went to the apartment managers hoping to move into another unit. She lives at the sprawling Mansion apartment complex in Independence, featuring hundreds of apartments. But managers denied Vickers' request. Instead, she was told she'd have to pay prorated rent to move out when her lease was up.
"I said I'm not paying you a dime because it's not my fault and I'm not able to live there," Vickers said.
The 41 Action News Investigators went to the Mansion office to get answers about Vickers' raccoon problem. After waiting to speak to a representative for about 15 minutes, the Investigators were told the company would contact them at a later time.
"The people in the office, I've been such good friends with them, I just thought the world of them," Vickers said. "And when you've got a problem, they're not there, they're gone."
After the 41 Action News Investigators' visit to the complex on Thursday, apartment managers sent a statement later in the day saying they were working with the tenant.
On Friday, they renegotiated with Vickers. They're no longer charging her July rent and they're returning her deposit. They're also paying $65 toward a one-month storage fee. And they're reimbursing her rent for roughly the last week in June.
As part of that deal, Vickers will get that money owed to her in 30 days.
The Mansion complex is owned by a company called Greystar out of Texas. The company's website shows it owns nine large complexes in the Kansas City area.
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Andy Alcock can be reached at anderson.alcock@kshb.com.
