The family of a Houston woman who died last year is suing her former landlord and a pest control company, claiming that a bedbug-killing heat treatment used in the woman’s apartment killed her.
In a wrongful death suit filed in Harris County on Tuesday, the family of Elizabeth Ashbaugh accuses the owners of the Laure Point Senior Apartments and Certified Termite and Pest Control of negligence that resulted in her death.
Laure Point declined to comment on the suit Tuesday. Requests for comment from CTPC were not returned.
Ashbaugh, 82, died from hyperthermia – a condition that results when the body absorbs more heat than it can dissipate – on July 28, 2017 after returning to the apartment she’d lived in with her husband for 13 years, the suits says.
In their suit, Ashbaugh’s family accuses the two companies of acting “with malice and/or conscious disregard for human safety.”
“Defendants failed to instruct (the Ashbaughs) on when it was safe to return to safe, failed to use a treatment for those in senior community and failed to communicate to (the Ashbaughs) that the home was unsafe to enter,” the suit says.
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