Family discovers its home was a meth lab

SEATTLE -- Jessie Bates was determined to keep meth out of her family's life for good. She'd been clean for several years, but her past came back to haunt her in the form of a house.

The house, priced at $235,000 and located in Suquamish, Wash., is on the edges of jurisdiction between Kitsap County and the WestNET tribal police. Jessie Bates, her husband John and son Tyler moved in on March 29, 2007 - Jessie Bates' birthday.

"We moved from a 600-square-foot, 1964-everything-original-including-the-carpet, single-wide trailer - so lots of neon orange," Jessie Bates said. "We were really excited about having our own house."

But in June 2008, the family discovered their dream home had a history.

A year and a half after the family bought the property, the summer heat uncovered the property's problems; the house had a stench, and Tyler began having serious respiratory problems that sent him to the emergency room.

"It was scary," Jessie said. "There's just no way for us to definitively know exactly what it was that was causing it. [Doctors] said, yeah it was definitely something that came out of the walls."

Later that summer, Jessie recognized traces of cooking meth - iodine staining on the walls; hardwood floors that began to deteriorate from the chemicals underneath them; and when she woke up to find sores all over her face, it was a face she had seen before.

It was what she looked like right before she went into rehab.

In September 2008, the family tested the house for meth lab contamination. As soon as the samples tested positive, John and Jessie Bates were required by law to report it to the Department of Health and move out within the next 48 hours. The sample that tested highest of contamination came from the room where Tyler slept.

The bigger problem to meth lab homes

You're selling a house," John Bates said. "Would you write, yes, this house was a meth lab? I wouldn't. And I'm pretty honest."

Sgt. Sean Whitcomb of the Seattle Police Department said while meth labs aren't as much of an issue in the Seattle area as they are in rural areas - he only recalls a meth lab bust occurring once or twice a year - the use of meth in Seattle is an issue.

"I can say with confidence that the issue with meth labs is one that is certainly more well-known to rural areas," Whitcomb said. "Where that methamphetamine ends up is very much our problem."

In Suquamish, however, where winding roads and a mass of greenery hide property from sight, the house had passed as a lab quietly. In January 2012, the Port Orchard Independent had reported on a trailer that had been busted as a meth lab in Suquamish in 2010 and, two years later, still remained contaminated and uninhabited because the owner claimed not to have enough money to decontaminate the property.

The seizure of illegal drug labs had dropped from 137, in 2008, to 61 in 2009, according to the Pacific Northwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a federal drug enforcement information program. Yet many labs, like John and Jessie Bates' home, are hidden from plain sight and aren't found by police. By the time the home is bought, the property is worthless, and blame sometimes can't be traced to the home seller or anyone who can offer compensation.

The price to pay

After discovering the house's history, the Bates moved in with Jessie's parents while they figured out their next step. The couple had few options.

One was to spend $15,000 to $20,000 to wipe down the house with bleach and try to make it past inspection by the Department of Health; there would have been extra costs for more repairs and a chance it still wouldn't pass the inspection. They didn't want to foreclose for risk of jeopardizing John Bates' government position, which required a security clearance and a stable financial statement.

Instead, they started from scratch: They spent $184,000 to demolish the house, fix the septic system, and rebuild. But they didn't have that money to spend, so relatives chipped in.

John said when he had spoken to the neighbors after discovering that it was a former meth lab, the neighbors revealed that they had known the house had serious problems and assumed that John and Jessie knew that when they bought the house.

"We were so angry," Jessie said. "For a while there at the beginning, we really felt that everyone had lied to us, and everyone knew, and it was a huge conspiracy. We were pissed, and we wanted someone - anyone, everyone - to pay."

Not included in the $184,000 the couple needed to rebuild the home was the $15,000 they had spent on two attorneys to see if they had a case against the home sellers.

Full disclosure

A question on the Seller Disclosure Statement, Form 17, asks whether the property was ever used to manufacture drugs. The home sellers had only owned the property for a year and never lived in the home, Jessie Bates said, but they still checked "no" instead of "I don't know" despite their lack of knowledge about the history of the property.

"It is our belief - according to what our neighbors had told us and conversations he had with the sellers - that they were aware of the meth-making history of the property, and they chose not to disclose that to us," Jessie Bates said. "And they chose not to disclose it to their real-estate agent who listed the house, and they chose not to disclose it to the home inspector. So by making that decision, it is our belief that they should've helped out with the cost of cleaning up."

Richard Hagar, home appraiser for American Home Appraisals, said when home buyers try pinning a suit against the home appraiser or home inspector involved in evaluating property value, it's usually a lost case. But those who would most likely have knowledge of the former meth lab, he added, are the home owners, who are also under legal obligation to report it.

Despite having hired a home inspector to look over the property before they had bought it, the couple found no signs of suspicion until much later. The property's history, Jessie said, was so carefully covered up that the home inspector would have had to tear apart the property in order to see it.

"It's hard to look at that level of work that went into a manufactured home and not be suspect," Jessie said. "Why were they working so hard when back then in '07, '06, most flippers just slapped on paint and put down some new carpet and called it good? ... If they didn't know, then wow, they put a lot of work into the property. But if they did, it was a little self-serving."

In order to sue the previous home owners, John and Jessie Bates would need to prove  the sellers knew about the property's history. The house had no drug history with police, only reports of DUIs and calls for domestic abuse. Jessie said their attorneys told them they have no case.

As for the real estate agent, a family friend who sold John and Jessie Bates the house, Jessie says she trusts that the agent was honest with them.

"I would really, really, really like to believe that she didn't know," Jessie Bates said. "We're always going to wonder who knew and didn't tell us. But in order for us to be at peace with this, we have to believe that the people that we trusted didn't lie to us."

Long-term costs

Jessie and John began trying for kids shortly after they got married and moved into their home in March. But they struggled.

Doctors said the chemical exposure from the meth lab home and stress had been factors to their fertility problems. Similar cases have linked children's autism to contaminated meth lab homes.

John and Jessie Bates finally conceived after trying for two and a half years; their little girl, Jordan, was born in 2009.

"On the one hand, we're so happy with the way that things turned out," Jessie said. In addition to her healthy "miracle babies" who came unexpectedly: "We both admit to each other that we never envisioned ourselves living in a house like this."

But there were so many other things for which they wanted to spend the money, Jessie said.

At the time the Bates family was struggling with a home they couldn't live in, sell, or foreclose, the largest attention they had received was from a local blogger. Five years later, they had been contacted by several media outlets including Fox News and local affiliate Q-13 Fox, bringing back feelings of resentment they had tried to bury. While the remnants of the former meth lab were gone, the financial burden, a ghost of their past, still remains.

"We've moved on, it's not even in our limelight anymore," John said, "and all of a sudden - boom, it's back."