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Baumann and Reinker, through a limited liability company called Norwood 2020, had filed a lawsuit against Shana Poole-Jones. The suit accused the activist and her nonprofit, Keep Pushing Inc., of trespassing and other alleged offenses for daring to pass out leaflets to renters in one of the buildings Baumann manages. She was letting them know that there was financial aid available to stave off eviction.

Lay dismissed the entire lawsuit. “I can breathe,� Poole-Jones told me after I let her know she had won. The legal action was nothing but intimidation, says her attorney, Robert Swearingen of : “It was obvious that this case was filed solely to bully and silence community activists from informing tenants of their rights.�

Soon, another judge in St. Louis County will get to decide whether Baumann’s company, Baumann Property Co., has violated the rights of one of those tenants, Regina Wingo. Until Nov. 13, 2019, Wingo and her three children were living in one of Baumann’s apartment complexes, Hathaway Village, in Florissant. She fell behind on her rent. There had been some unforeseen medical bills. Wingo had also recently divorced her husband. She has a good job — at the county health department — but she got behind.

“Life happened,� she tells me.

Baumann began eviction proceedings. Wingo went to court, where an attorney handed her a sheet of paper and told her, she recalls, that if she signed it, she could then work out the back rent with her landlord. She signed. “I didn’t know what I was signing,� Wingo says. She met with the woman who ran the complex and tried to make arrangements to get caught up in back rent. She got a money order for some of the back rent. The apartment manager refused it.

On Nov. 13, Wingo went to work. Her son called her when he got home from school. His key didn’t work. The locks had been changed. Wingo got off work early and rushed home. She asked the landlord if she could get inside to gather her belongings. The answer was no.

“I was devastated,� Wingo remembers.

Her children had no shoes and socks, no clothes, nothing. “Everything we owned was in there.� A few days later she called the St. Louis County Police Department and asked for an officer to accompany her back to the apartment so she could get her stuff. That didn’t work either. The landlord kept everything: a big-screen television, her kids’ Playstation, furniture, family photos and heirlooms, a car that had been paid off. Wingo lost it all.

Now she’s suing Baumann for deceptive practices and what her attorney, Richard Voytas, calls in court documents “civil conversion,� a nice way to allege that the landlord stole Wingo’s possessions. Here’s the scary part, and it’s one reason why Voytas called after he saw my column on Poole-Jones. Everybody knows that the region — and the country — faces a pending eviction crisis because the moratoriums on such actions caused by the pandemic will soon be expiring.

In Wingo’s lawsuit, Baumann and Reinker claim that Missouri law allows them to take possession of anything they want when they evict somebody, at least in certain circumstances. “(U)nder Missouri law, the removal of Plaintiff’s personal property in conjunction with this recovery of real estate is a lawful undertaking,� Reinker wrote in a motion to dismiss that hasn’t been ruled on. Reinker has since withdrawn from the case and Baumann has new attorneys, Stephen J. Moore and Carolyn Geoghegan. They declined to comment.

Missouri does have a law that allows landlords to seize possessions after they’ve been abandoned. But the law, Voytas says, requires written notice and gives clear parameters as to what abandonment is, and it is not, as was the case with Wingo, leaving one’s apartment in the morning to go to work.

In the motion for dismissal, Baumann argues that Wingo legally abandoned the property after she signed the “consent judgment� in October 2019.

“Think about the precedent that this would set for evicted people,� Voytas says. “I think this is going to be an issue a lot of renters are going to face in coming months. I’ve never seen a situation like this, where a landlord says, in effect, what’s yours is mine.�

Wingo and her children are living with her parents. She’s paid them back for the clothing and other items they helped her replace. She’s paid off her back rent. She’s trying to rebuild her credit.

“I’m just trying to start over,� she says. But before she can totally move on from this difficult chapter in her life, she hopes a judge — or a jury — sends one of the biggest landlords in north St. Louis County a message:

The people who rent from you might not have much, but what they have is theirs.