She owed thousands of dollars in rent. But did her Puyallup landlord take things too far?

In a quiet neighborhood on a cul-de-sac just west of Puyallup city limits, the drill spinning into Betty Halbert’s front-door keyhole caused a sudden racket.

Moments earlier, the drill’s operator made a beeline to the door from the street. He wore a backward baseball cap, reflective yellow shirt and tan work boots. Inside her duplex, Halbert rushed to investigate and, when face to face with the stranger outside, ordered him to leave and warned that she would be calling the police.

About 10 seconds after Halbert, 59, retreated indoors, the man swiftly flung the door open with his boot and took several steps into the living room. Halbert scurried to a pitchfork leaning against a wall, armed herself and jabbed at the man. He lifted up a cow-pattern-cushioned dining chair to block thrusts of the garden tool before scampering out of the home.

“I don’t know what he was doing,” Halbert told The News Tribune in July from the duplex she had rented for some six years. “I had been gardening out front. So I went after him.”

Halbert called for help. So did the apparent intruder, law enforcement records show. The man said he had a right to be there: He told a dispatcher he had signed a lease for the location.

It was an odd and dangerous scene that unfolded June 7, according to Halbert’s account and surveillance video she shared with The News Tribune. It is only one among a number of incidents in recent months that she claimed were orchestrated by her landlord, Qifan “Tony” Shi.

Halbert moved into the duplex home in 2018, and Shi bought it in October 2021, county property records show. He soon raised the $1,400 rent by $250, according to Halbert, who began having persistent issues paying it on time last year after she lost her ability to work. Halbert, who had a maintenance job, suffered a cervical spine injury while on the clock in December 2022.

Halbert said she tried to no avail for longer than a year to get a copy of her rental agreement from Shi and the property’s manager in order to apply for rental assistance. Her ex-boyfriend took her previous copy, she said. In July 2023, the property manager revealed that Halbert didn’t have a lease with Shi and offered to draw one up and send it to Halbert to sign, a text message shows. Halbert claimed she never received it.

Reliant on workers’ comp, she regularly paid what she could but never caught up, sending anywhere between $250 and $1,200 in attempts to satisfy past-due rent, according to dozens of text messages between her and her property manager that she shared with The News Tribune.

By January, Halbert was four months behind. In early June, she owed $12,000 shortly after Shi filed an unlawful detainer complaint against her, court records show. Although Shi pursued an eviction through the appropriate legal channels, he has been accused of stepping outside the bounds of the law in an attempt to force Halbert out.

In a statement to The News Tribune, Shi denied wrongdoing, saying that Halbert not only failed to pay rent but also vandalized his property.

“Betty’s accusations against me are a blatant defamation of character,” he said.

Since May, Halbert said, her vehicle’s driver-side windows were broken, a drone flew directly into her backyard, surveillance cameras were installed without notice, her power-meter box was destroyed and a water pipe was busted in July by men reportedly performing maintenance, leaving an open sewage hole in her backyard.

She had no electricity or water late last month and relied on a neighbor to provide a bucket of water so that she could flush her toilet. She also installed her own cameras, including a second one in her backyard after she said she was alerted by her alarm of a man walking back and forth there during the wee morning hours of July 4.

In a court filing certified under the penalty of perjury, Halbert’s duplex neighbor declared that the property manager had offered her $50 to get Halbert out of the home for a few hours and later $1,000 to file a restraining order against Halbert. The neighbor declined both alleged proposals, saying she didn’t feel comfortable with either and had no legal reasoning to seek protection from Halbert.

“I’m scared to death. I really am,” Halbert said during an interview on July 23. “What kind of person destroys his own house to get someone like me out?”

Less than a week later, Halbert moved on, leaving behind half of her belongings, trading in the duplex for a basement in the house of someone she knew and feeling certain that she had been illegally driven out.

Escalating events

The remedy to an unwanted tenant exists in court.

Errin Reynolds is general manager of the The Landlord Law Group and treasurer of the Washington Landlord Association. Reynolds said in an interview that she didn’t know a landlord who would prefer legal action, which is expensive, to instead working with a tenant over time.

If a landlord has made a “business decision” to file an eviction, Reynolds said, she advises they hire an attorney to ensure an eviction is handled properly.

“There’s no secret way to get people out. There’s just not,” she said. “You’ve got to go through the legal process.”

Washington State’s Residential Landlord-Tenant Act, which details the responsibilities of landlords and tenants, was created so there weren’t situations where landlords took matters into their own hands, including through force or harassment, according to Chris Brunetti, managing attorney in the Eviction Prevention Unit for the Northwest Justice Project.

Brunetti told The News Tribune that evictions can be resolved within a few months — a fairly quick turnaround in the context of civil litigation, where cases might drag out for a year or longer. While he noted there were landlords addressing evictions appropriately, he said that it wasn’t unheard of to learn of those who were not.

“Maybe not quite this extreme,” he said, referring to the allegations in Puyallup, “but certainly we hear about these situations fairly regularly.”

He advised clients to ensure they’re documenting experiences, including by making police reports when necessary, because they could prove relevant either in an eviction action or potential other case such as a wrongful eviction.

Three Sheriff’s Department incident reports taken this year at Halbert’s address reflected that “the victim states the landlord is sending people to the residence to harass her by breaking things at the house,” according to sheriff’s spokesperson Sgt. Darren Moss.

Moss said there is no proof that the landlord was responsible. Deputies have documented the crimes, but there have been no suspects to contact when they arrive on scene, he added.

Halbert said that she repeatedly was told by law enforcement that the issues she had raised were civil matters, but Moss said that the alleged vandalism was not a civil issue.

The News Tribune, which sought the reports in a public records request, had not yet received copies as of Monday. The News Tribune also later requested a separate report about vandalism that Shi claimed was perpetrated by Halbert. Shi said there had been “multiple incidents” but didn’t clarify, when asked, what Halbert allegedly did.

Shi cited to The News Tribune a police incident number. South Sound 911, a police and fire dispatch agency used by law enforcement and fire departments in the county, said the number wasn’t tied to a formal report but instead a police dispatcher’s record of a June call from Shi. He had accused Halbert of breaking a surveillance camera attached to the neighboring duplex unit, according to the call log. In an interview, Halbert denied doing so.

On Monday night, about a week after Halbert moved out, Shi sent photos to The News Tribune of large graffiti on multiple walls of the home. Some messages were threatening and two contained a racial or homophobic slur.

In a brief interview Tuesday, Halbert denied responsibility, although she acknowledged spraying a non-derogatory message with a profanity in a small corner of the garage. Halbert said she took video of the home before departing for proof of its condition.

“I would never do that,” she said. “I have no means to destroy things because that’s not me.”

One thing is for certain: The issues that arose at the duplex, prompting responses from various agencies, upset the peace of a tight-knit community. At one point in May, the neighborhood was without power when Halbert said hers was cut off a first time; strange traffic has been seen seemingly casing the street; and wafts from the sewer hole in Halbert’s backyard were noticeable nearby depending on the wind, according to some neighbors.

“It’s one thing with the landlord-tenant dispute,” one neighbor said late last month before Halbert had left. “We understand both sides of that.”

The neighbor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said they worried about a cascade of nuisance incidents that escalated to violence and noted that quarrels between landlords and tenants should be handled through the legal process set up to address such issues.

“What’s coming next is the big question,” they said.

New renters and legal action

The man with a drill wasn’t the only person who arrived at Halbert’s home claiming to have signed a rental agreement for the property, according to Halbert and law enforcement call records that she shared with The News Tribune.

On May 31, a woman showed up among a handful of people, insisting she had a signed agreement, and the group attempted to enter the home, Halbert said.

“I’m on the phone with the police, and they’re rattling and shaking and trying different keys, and knocking,” Halbert said. “And I’m like — you know, I’m apologizing to them.”

That same day, Shi reported to law enforcement that he didn’t know who was inside the home but they shouldn’t be there, in an apparent reference to Halbert, according to a dispatcher’s record of the call. Shi also reported that the home had been vacant for several months and he had rented the unit to new tenants.

The next day, a man alerted law enforcement that he had rented the home but couldn’t get into it because the locks had been changed, and it also appeared someone had been living there. On July 4, the man who had allegedly been in Halbert’s backyard yelled at her that the home was his, and he vowed to return, she said. When he did, an accompanying woman claimed to be in possession of a rental contract.

Shi said he didn’t double-rent the house. Instead, he explained, his legal effort to evict Halbert had been stalled by factors outside of his control that were ultimately to blame for the situation.

On May 15, Shi filed an unlawful detainer — the formal term for an eviction proceeding — in Pierce County Superior Court. The filing indicated that Halbert had signed a one-year lease with a previous property owner in January 2018 and the rental agreement reverted afterward to a month-to-month tenancy.

The rent at the time of the filing was $1,650 monthly.

The court issued a writ of restitution on May 21, directing the Sheriff’s Department to remove Halbert from the property within 10 days. The Sheriff’s Department, however, couldn’t carry out the eviction within that window, court records show.

“In all my previous unlawful detainer cases, the Sheriff’s Department has always managed to meet this requirement within the 10-day period,” Shi said in an email to The News Tribune. “After obtaining the Writ, I rented out the property with a lease starting well beyond this 10-day window.”

Based on when the writ was issued, it would have expired on May 31, the day Halbert said she first had to turn away a purported new renter.

Shi, who denied any involvement in altercations between Halbert and the apparent new tenants, suggested that a backlog in a surge of eviction cases had impaired the Sheriff’s Department’s ability to process Halbert’s eviction and others in a timely manner.

Moss confirmed that evictions were backed up. The COVID-19 pandemic initially caused the backlog, which has been exacerbated by staffing (four deputies compose the team carrying out evictions) and a recently voter-approved initiative in the city of Tacoma that significantly limits when evictions can occur.

In May, the backlog was 42 days, according to Moss.

Eviction delayed

Two weeks after Halbert was ordered to be removed from her home, the writ of restitution was stayed, or put on hold by attorneys for Shi and Halbert. As conditions of the stay, Halbert had to work with a housing advocacy group to determine her eligibility for rental assistance or secure other housing and leave her home, according to a court document.

The stay was jointly agreed to by Shi’s attorney and Halbert’s legal counsel, an attorney from Tacomaprobono Community Lawyers, the document shows. Although the eviction was paused, Halbert said her troubles continued.

In the days that followed, Halbert’s neighbor claimed to have twice been the subject of an attempted bribe by the unit’s property manager, who was unresponsive to messages seeking comment for this story. Shi also didn’t address a question regarding the claims in an inquiry sent by email. Halbert reported that her vehicle’s broken windows, the pitchfork altercation and the shutting off of water and power each occurred after the stay was issued.

Shi alleged that he had been misled into agreeing to the stay, saying he was convinced by Halbert’s counsel, through her communications with his attorney, that a stay would expedite the eviction since waiting for the Sheriff’s Department to execute the writ could be delayed by up to two months.

“After I agreed to sign the stay writ, her attorney then pressured me to provide a zero-balance ledger, despite Betty owing close to $20,000. Providing such a ledger would be a blatant lie,” Shi wrote in an email to The News Tribune. “It seems that her free attorney is engaging in unethical practices to advance the so-called ‘housing justice’ agenda, which is both immoral and unjust.”

Tacomaprobono Community Lawyers declined to comment.

The court terminated the legal-aid nonprofit’s representation of Halbert on July 25, court records show. The filing noted that further action in the eviction proceeding remained stayed until the nonprofit found replacement counsel for Halbert.

Now that Halbert has left the premises in question, the issue of property possession is moot, according to Brunetti.

“In that situation, the court must either (1) dismiss the case, or (2) if the landlord wishes to pursue a judgment for rent or damages, the court can convert the case to a normal civil action,” Brunetti wrote in an email.

Seeking protection

There are Washington laws in place to protect tenants who might sue for wrongful eviction. It’s against the law to remove or exclude a tenant from the premises except under court order and for a landlord to intentionally cut off a tenant’s utility services.

There’s also a “covenant of quiet enjoyment” implied in every lease, protecting a tenant’s right to use and enjoy a property from any wrongful act by a landlord.

Shi said that his goal was always to pursue a legal eviction.

He’s been accused before of harassing a tenant in Pierce County, but a lawsuit against him was dropped, court records show. In November 2022, a tenant sued Shi and alleged that, after missing two rental payments, they were threatened by other individuals, their possessions were bagged up and placed outside, and their power was disconnected.

The lawsuit, which also claimed Shi had sent the tenant harassing text messages, was dismissed in February 2023.

In a court filing responding to the allegations, Shi named a laundry list of the tenant’s alleged misdeeds. The tenant purportedly assaulted Shi, allowed an unauthorized occupant to live in the property, stole the internet router, threatened a housemate and vandalized Shi’s video camera, among other things. A housemate ultimately filed a protection order against the tenant, saying the tenant had sprayed them with mace from point-blank range.

Last month, Halbert filed for her own protection order. She requested that the court prevent Shi from contacting or harming her and coming within 1,000 feet of her and her vehicle, court records show.

Shi didn’t respond to an inquiry seeking comment on the order, which most recently was reissued July 26 because the court needed more time to serve him.

Halbert said she wanted the order in place despite her recent move.

“I wasn’t there since 2018 just so I could just pick up and move in three days. That definitely was not my plan,” she said. “That was supposed to be my last home, you know?”

Since relocating, Halbert said she has felt a sense of relief and has been able to sleep better than in months. She said her focus now was on recovering medically and financially. She also doesn’t have to worry about the threat of a humiliating ouster.

Halbert shared a score of text messages with The News Tribune that she said were from her former property manager, who often inquired on behalf of Shi about rent that Halbert owed. In one message, dated May 24, the property manager implored Halbert to move out.

“If you don’t move yourself, the sheriff will come to drag you out. We will take video of the whole process and send to your families,” she wrote. “What will you say to your grandchildren at that time? You can say, ‘I took advantage of others and I wanted to take more, but police stopped me.’”

Shi didn’t respond to a question about the alleged text message — one of more than a dozen questions about the Halbert situation sent to him by email.

He had expressed concern over whether the story would be fair and balanced. He initially replied to The News Tribune’s questions with questions of his own.

He asked whether landlords should bear financial burdens, such as property taxes and mortgages, when legal interventions were used to delay eviction processes. He asked whether tenants should be entitled to free legal representation in straightforward cases, including non-payment of rent.

“Do you believe that tenants should be allowed to remain in a rental unit indefinitely without paying rent?” Shi wrote.