Housewives Seize NYC Portrait of 103-Year-Old Woman and Threaten to Dump Her Ashes: Lawsuit
A heartless home health aide and her family allegedly took in a patient Apartment in the Upper East Siderefuses to let her daughter in after the 103-year-old woman dies — and cruelly threatens to flush the old lady’s ashes down the toilet if she tries, according to court records.
Incredibly, the alleged occupiers claim they had “inheritance rights” to the East 86th Street Route because they were like the dying woman’s “family,” according to court papers.
Tatiana Abello, her mother and sister live in a two-bedroom paddock with $2,088 per month in rent for 18 months, and their numbers have been growing since Vera Katz’ death in August 2021, legal papers show. It is not clear if they paid any rent.
Tatiana Abello was hired in 2016 to help foster Katz, a onetime big band singer who performed under the name Vera Stewart, her daughter, Aline Skylar, said.
Eventually, Abelo brought her sister, Victoria, and her mother, Olympia Oviedo-Reyes, to the 1,221-square-foot abode, according to Skyler. Women from Colombia.
“I loved these people. I had a connection with them because they took care of my mother,” Skylar, 65, told The Post.
Things changed about a month after Katz’s death, Skyler said. who lived in the apartment for more than a year during the pandemic.
“We talked about what the exit plan would be,” Skylar said of her conversations with Apelus. “I bought them dinners, I bought them gifts.”
Then she visited one day and “there was a sliding latch” on the door, she recalls.
Allegedly, the Apelus family refused to open the door for Skyler, who was paying the rent. Skyler also claimed that they refused to let the cops in. The NYPD usually does not get involved in housing disputes, leaving cases to the courts.
“They were threatening to flush my parents’ ashes down the toilet,” Skylar, who in court papers accused Apellus of refusing to return her parents’ remains, claimed.
Records show that Skyler, left with no other recourse, took the Apelous family to Manhattan Housing Court, where by December 2021 they agreed to turn over the ashes of Vera and Skyler’s father, Ralph Katz, a New York Times editor who died in 2003.
But the proceedings were inexplicably dropped after the ashes were turned over, leaving Katz confined to her childhood home and unable to access her mother’s belongings, according to court papers.
The landlord at 305 East 86th Street, where similar apartments for Katz rent for $7,000 a month, is suing the Abellos and Skylar in an effort to get the house back. And they want the Apellus family to start paying the rent.
The landlord said: “Tenants should not be given ‘windfall’ and allowed to escape ‘free rent’.”
But Apelos claim in court papers that they are now “legal tenants with stable rent.” Their attorney, Alan Goldberg, argued in the Manhattan Housing Court suit that their “loving familial relationship” with Katz before her death gave the Apellos family “rights of succession.”
A baffled Skyler insisted, “They were never on the lease. They never paid the rent. How do you love someone when you’re going to flush them down the toilet?”
Documents showed that the ashes were later returned to Skylar by the Apollos family under an agreement made in housing court.
Skyler, who is seeking a reinstatement of her eviction proceedings against Apellus, said she did not know what happened to her parents’ property, after seeing Social media posts apparently showing the apartment devoid of her family’s furniture and memorabilia.
She said “the age of his possessions, memorabilia, my father’s books, and a fine collection of vinyl” seems to have passed.
“If this happened to me, it could happen to anyone who keeps home health care providers,” she said.
Apellos and their attorneys declined to comment.
Additional reporting by Georgia Worrell and Helen Seidman
