The Region - News from May 3, 1985

Four years after they went to court to get their landlord to rid their tenement quarters in Central Los Angeles of rats, spiders and filth, 15 Latino families will share in a $500,000 out-of-court settlement of the case. Noemi Hernandez, a Salvadoran immigrant, led the tenant fight that resulted in a class-action suit against landlord Rudolph Stabach in April, 1981. The case was in its fourth month of trial in Los Angeles Superior Court when the settlement was reached. Only four of the 15 plaintiff families still reside in the apartment complex, occupied predominantly by Latinos. “We are still here,” Hernandez said at the apartment she shares with her husband and two young children, “because I know my work will not be done until I see the repairs are made.”