Landlord: 'The news media blames me for everything'

Houstonist noted yesterday that the owner of an East End boarding house that burned Monday, killing a man, also owned another boarding house that burned last summer, also killing a man. But the owner, Juan Hernandez, said the pair of fires wasn't really his fault: "The news media blames me for everything."

Investigators are still trying to figure out the cause of Monday's fire at 230 Delmar St., but residents told KHOU they thought it was electrical — one resident said the breakers hadn't been working right for a while, but management hadn't fixed them. After Hernandez's boarding house on Avenue C burned last year, investigators checked out the Delmar property and noted several code violations, including electrical problems and the lack of a certificate of occupancy. Hernandez, in his charming way, said he had a certificate: "The idiots go out there and they say, 'You don't have a certificate,' so we have to produce it. But we have them."

He sounds like the kind of landlord you wouldn't want to have — and that's apparently how some of his ex-tenants feel. A group of them who lived in the Avenue C house have sued Hernandez, claiming his negligence led to the fire. We're sure Hernandez feels like the tenants blame him for everything, too.