A Long Island City tenant who got herself adopted to claim a rent-controlled apartment won’t be packing her bags anytime soon.
Maria DeTommaso, as she now calls herself, appeared in Queens Housing Court last week as her landlords tried to evict her from an apartment in which they say she has no right to live.
After six previous delays over the last year, and after a last-ditch attempt to once again postpone the case, a judge said he would not put up with more excuses.
“She has made my life a living hell,” Sugrim Outar, who owns the small apartment building with his wife, said on the witness stand.
DeTommaso, 63, who was born Pamela Becker, first came to Outar’s building in the 1990s as a cat sitter for a tenant. By 2002, she was living with Nicholas DeTommaso, a retired dock worker who had lived in the building his entire life.
Twenty-two days before DeTommaso died in 2009 at age 85, Becker managed to get herself adopted by the ailing man.
Then DeTommaso claimed she was entitled to her “father’s” rent-controlled $100-a-month apartment in the six-unit building on 47th Road.
But the Outars withdrew their suit last week over technical issues. Sugrim Outar said he will still seek to evict DeTomasso.