A Portland father has sued the owner of a northeast Portland apartment complex, alleging that weeks of rodent complaints ended Dec. 22 when his 10-month-old son was found with a dead mouse in his mouth inside the family’s unit.
The lawsuit has drawn unusual attention because it turns a common landlord tenant dispute into a habitability case involving an infant, emergency medical care and a family that says it felt forced to flee its home. Bryan Padilla says AMFP V Pine Village LLC failed to keep the apartment sanitary and safe at the Davenport Apartments. The company had not publicly commented in the most recent published reports on the case.
According to the complaint, Padilla and his family moved into the apartment on Nov. 8 and soon began reporting what he described as a rodent infestation inside the unit. He says the problem did not ease. On Dec. 22, the complaint says, a mouse came through a hole in the wall and ended up inside the apartment. Before the parents could stop him, Padilla’s son picked up the dead animal and put it in his mouth. Padilla later said he was “just livid” and left work immediately after learning what had happened. The family says the incident was not an isolated surprise but the worst point in a problem they had already brought to management more than once. That timeline matters because the case will likely turn on whether the owner had notice of the alleged conditions and enough time to fix them before the child was exposed.
The child was taken to an emergency room for evaluation soon after the discovery, according to Padilla and his lawyer, Michael Fuller. The reports reviewed on the case say doctors did not find signs of a serious immediate problem from the contact. A visit summary described in those reports said there was no need for rabies vaccination at that time. No public report reviewed for this article said the child suffered a lasting injury, but the family says the event changed how safe the apartment felt from that point forward. In the complaint, Padilla says the conditions affected sleep, eating and daily life inside the unit. Those claims are important because the suit does not rest only on the brief hospital visit. It also argues that the apartment had already become hard to live in before the Dec. 22 incident and became impossible to trust afterward.
The case has also produced sharply different descriptions of life at the complex. In interviews with local television, neighbors Ronnie Williams and Dana Barbee said they were shocked by Padilla’s account. Williams said a dead mouse in a baby’s mouth would be terrifying for any parent. Barbee said the report made her uneasy, even though she had not personally seen the same kind of problem in her own unit. Their comments do not resolve whether Padilla’s apartment had the conditions described in the complaint, but they show how hard habitability cases can be to judge from outside a single unit. One tenant’s account can center on holes in a wall, garbage and vermin, while another tenant living a short walk away says the property appears clean. That split is likely to matter if the case moves into witness testimony, inspections or settlement talks.
The property at the center of the lawsuit is the Davenport Apartments near Northeast Glisan Street and Northeast 178th Avenue. The apartment community is marketed online as The Davenport, and public rental listings identify it as a northeast Portland complex with one to three bedroom units. In the complaint, Padilla says the ordinary promise of a rental home was broken. He argues that walls, floors and living spaces should keep out obvious hazards, especially in a home with a crawling infant. Fuller has framed the dispute as a straightforward question of whether the owner met Oregon’s habitability standards. The complaint points to the Oregon Residential Landlord Tenant Act, which requires landlords to maintain rental housing in a safe and sanitary condition. Cases under that law often rise or fall on records such as maintenance requests, photos, repair logs and inspection evidence, all of which could become more important if the dispute continues in court.
Padilla is seeking about $122,000 in noneconomic damages and roughly $2,600 in rent repayment, though some published reports list the rent figure at about $2,665. Noneconomic damages typically cover harms that are real but harder to measure, such as distress, fear, disruption and loss of enjoyment of a home. The complaint says the family broke its rental agreement, moved out within days and later relocated to California to be closer to relatives. It also says the family should not have had to keep paying for a unit they believed was unsafe. At this stage, those are allegations in a civil complaint, not findings by a judge or jury. The owner will have the chance to deny the claims, challenge the timeline, dispute whether the infestation was as severe as described and argue that the damages request is too high. No criminal charge or criminal investigation has been reported in connection with the dispute.
For now, the public record is still built mostly around the family’s complaint, brief medical details and the comments Padilla has made since filing suit. Fuller said the family has been trying to move past the episode after uprooting itself so soon after moving in. That detail gives the case a broader human dimension beyond the single shocking image at its center. The story is also about a family that says it tried to settle into a new apartment in November, spent weeks dealing with alleged pests, rushed a baby to the hospital in December and then left the home almost immediately. It is about the way a routine rental problem can become a legal fight once a child is involved. And it is about how a civil case begins, not with sworn trial testimony, but with one side laying out a version of events that the other side may later contest point by point.
The next steps are likely to be procedural. The defendant can file a formal response, the parties can exchange records and lawyers can seek photographs, maintenance logs, medical notes and any inspection evidence tied to the apartment. A judge could later set deadlines, encourage settlement talks or move the case toward trial if it is not resolved earlier. No public ruling on the merits had been reported in the accounts reviewed for this article. That leaves the case where many housing disputes begin: at the complaint stage, with serious allegations on file, no final answer from the property owner in public reporting and several key questions still open about notice, repairs and damages.
Author note: Last updated March 18, 2026.