Nine months before the City of St. Louis took legal action against Dara Daugherty and her associates’ wide-ranging “illegal rooming house” scheme, attorney Ryan Gavin took Daugherty to court with similar allegations — and won a $1.8 million judgment against her.
Gavin filed the lawsuit against Daugherty and one of her LLCs in April of 2023 on behalf of James Cole, who had rented a room from Daugherty in the Benton Park West neighborhood. Cole, a laborer, paid Daugherty $500 a month to stay at a property that had been condemned by the city and later described as “a haven for illegal drug use and criminal activity.”
Cole ended up being stabbed on site by another tenant. The lawsuit filed by Gavin alleged that Daugherty failed to provide her renters with “safe and inhabitable premise” in which to live, that she didn’t provide repairs or maintenance or do any due diligence in screening renters and that all this amounted to negligence.
In the process of writing and researching that lawsuit, Gavin and just one other staffer at his firm uncovered much of what the city would later reveal in its bombshell suit, filed by its Affirmative Litigation Unit nine months later.