Ocean Settles Suit & Sells, Sells, Sells

Ocean Management’s Shmuel Aizenberg won’t have to take the witness stand in Waterbury after all — now that his company has struck a last-minute settlement in a long-standing child lead poisoning lawsuit that had been set to go to trial this week.

That jury trial was to determine how much the local megalandlord had to pay a mom whose son suffered ​“irreversible brain damage” while living at one of Ocean’s New Haven apartments on Edgewood Avenue.

While the dollar amount of that deal remains secret, public land records show that plenty of cash has been flowing into Ocean’s coffers — as the company has sold another 37 New Haven rental properties for nearly $13 million over the past two months.

That state court case, Dayla Stevenson et al v. Ocean 60 LLC et al, dates back to September 2019.

It was filed by a mom who, from 2009 to 2018, lived in an Edgewood Avenue two-family house owned by an affiliate of Aizenberg’s megalandlord-real estate investment-property management company.

“This is a lead poisoning case where Defendants violated federal, state and local laws by failing to timely abate known lead hazards at their rental property and falsely informing Plaintiff’s family their apartment was lead-safe, although Defendants were aware of open lead violations,” reads a summary of the case included in a May 3 trial management order jointly filed by plaintiff’s attorney Nancy Fairfield Sachs and defense attorney Gerald Giaimo.

The plaintiff’s son was ​“lead-poisoned at the property and consequently suffered irreversible brain damage,” that summary reads.

In November 2022, a state judge entered a default against Ocean for failing to file various court-ordered responses during the discovery phase of the case.

After more than 600 official court filings by the plaintiffs, defense, and judge over the past five years, the case was all set to go to trial to determine how much money Ocean owed the plaintiffs in the form of compensatory and punitive damages. Jury selection was to begin in a Waterbury state court on Tuesday.

Now that trial won’t happen. Giaimo and Sachs both confirmed to the Independent that the two sides have reached a settlement.

“The settlement and its terms are, by agreement, confidential. Accordingly, neither I nor my client should comment about it,” Giaimo said.

Sachs also declined to comment, on the settlement in general and the agreement’s dollar amount in particular.

In addition to not commenting on the settlement details, Giaimo told the Independent that his client, Aizenberg, has no comment on Ocean’s latest flood of local property sales.

According to warranty deeds posted to the city’s land records database since March 12, Ocean affiliates have sold 37 different New Haven rental properties containing 93 different apartments for a combined total of $12.9 million. Those 37 different property transactions to 37 different buyers were for rental properties that the city last appraised for tax purposes as worth a combined $9.4 million.

Those newly sold ex-Ocean properties are listed in full below. They include a single-unit condo at 1012 Quinnipiac Ave. (sold for $272,000), a two-family house at 163 Chatham St. (sold for $370,000), a three-family house at 86 Sylvan Ave. (sold for $3375,000), and the four-family house (sold for $500,000) among many others. One of those properties, a two-family house at 45 Atwater St., was sold by one Ocean affiliate to another Ocean affiliate for $330,000 before that second Ocean affiliate sold it to a third party for $445,000.

These latest sales come after Ocean affiliates sold 22 properties containing 69 different dwelling units for more than $9.4 million in the first two-plus months of the year. That means Ocean’s sold off 59 different rental properties containing 162 different apartments for a total of $22.4 million so far this year alone.