City Rallies to Stop Family’s Eviction

A West Hollywood couple who are adopting twin babies with HIV weren’t welcomed with a baby shower when they arrived home with the infants.

They were greeted instead with twin eviction notices for the 5-month-olds.

“Each of them got one,” Donna Burns said of the “three-day notices to quit” that she said arrived in the mail this week for tiny Kerri Ann and Steven Timothy.

The landlord also posted an eviction notice on Burns’ apartment door that neighbors noticed. And their outrage over the ouster triggered a firestorm in a city where HIV and AIDS are prominent issues.

On Friday -- the day the family was supposed to be out -- the landlord bowed to public pressure and rescinded the ouster order, giving the family more time to find a new home.

Burns and her husband, Kerry, both 43, say they took in the twins to prevent them from possibly being separated in different foster homes after their drug-addicted birth mother gave them up. Besides being HIV-positive, the infants were born with heroin and cocaine addictions and are considered “medically fragile” by doctors, according to the couple.

But the twins’ presence was a violation of the lease on the one-bedroom North Flores Street apartment where the couple has lived for more than a year, according to the building’s landlord. Besides that, the infants’ loud crying kept other apartment residents awake at night, the landlord said.

The babies’ plight became public last week when neighbors in the apartment house saw the eviction order on the door. One of them called West Hollywood Mayor Pro Tem Steve Martin. He, in turn, launched a campaign to keep a roof over the babies’ heads.

Martin argued that by adopting twins the couple was in compliance with the city’s rent-control ordinance, which allows tenants to move in a third party if they have a baby. Being twins, Kerri Ann and Steven Timothy count as one, Martin said.

Karl Slovin, who manages the property for its New York owner, said the two babies “are keeping people in the building up” and that it was a shock to everybody in the building” to suddenly have “nonstop screaming” by infants.

“We called the tenants, and they said they’d be gone in three months. Then they said no, they can’t do that.”

Kerry Burns, an actor and computer programmer, said he and his wife realized the first day that their one-bedroom unit would not be large enough for their new family.

“The children’s placement with us came sooner than we thought,” Burns said.

Burns said the search for larger living quarters was delayed by the twins’ condition. Besides administering drugs they hope will fight children’s HIV virus, the couple are coping with the babies’ withdrawal from drugs. Both children have spent stints in the hospital since the pair took them in.

“They were born crack babies,” he said. “It’s been pretty hectic.”

Both Burns and his wife say they have special empathy for HIV sufferers. That’s because both have lost brothers to AIDS.

Donna Burns’ brother, Steven, died of complications from AIDS in 1998. Kerry Burns’ brother, Timothy, died in 1987.

Troubled by his brother’s death, Kerry Burns wrote and staged a one-man play called “Markings of the Soul” about his relationship with his brother. He has performed it in more than 50 cities.

It was at a performance in Tulsa that the New Jersey-born Burns met his wife-to-be, an Oklahoma farm girl. “We had so much in common. The play makes you get angry, it makes you laugh, and it makes you cry,” Donna Burns said.

After moving to West Hollywood, Donna Burns took a job as a substitute caregiver at the social services agency Caring for Children and Families with AIDS. That’s where she first saw little Kerri Ann, she said.

On Tuesday, the couple received a commendation from the West Hollywood City Council. Others, meanwhile, began questioning Slovin on the eviction.

Slovin initially depicted Martin’s involvement as a political move. “He’s up for reelection. I think that’s what this is all about,” he said Wednesday. By Friday, he had softened his position: The Burns family has until the end of June to move.

Slovin and his lawyer could not be reached for comment Friday. But Martin said the landlord has even agreed to give Donna and Kerry Burns a letter of recommendation.

“That will help them find a new place,” he said. “That will give them an opportunity to find a new place in their neighborhood.”

And that’s important to Donna Burns.

“The community really came through for us,” she said Friday. “After what we’ve been through, we don’t want to leave West Hollywood.”