Tenants at two apartment buildings in Northwest Washington say their landlord’s response to complaints about mice, roaches, and weeks-long heating outages wasn’t repairs. It was retaliation, according to a lawsuit filed by the District of Columbia’s attorney general, and some of the tactics described go well beyond the usual landlord-tenant friction. Investigators say the property owners played loud music to drown out a tenants’ rally, threatened to call police on residents who held meetings, and sent eviction notices to the very people leading the pushback against them.
The DC Office of the Attorney General filed suit on June 29, 2026, against Saifur Khan and Monna Khan, along with their companies 16th St. Heights Aaron LLC and Ahmed Inc., over conditions at 1355 Peabody Street NW and 6000 13th Street NW. Together the two Brightwood neighborhood buildings hold 96 units, and the complaint says the violations documented there go back to at least 2022.
What tenants say they were living with
The allegations read like a checklist of everything a rental unit shouldn’t have. Heating outages that stretched for days or entire weeks during the coldest months. Chronic infestations of mice, cockroaches, and bedbugs that tenants say never got resolved. Broken doors, windows, walls, ceilings, and floors. Missing smoke detectors and exposed wiring. Damaged appliances and electrical equipment sitting exposed to water intrusion. Some of the residents named in the case had lived in these buildings for more than a decade, which the attorney general’s office points to as evidence of just how rooted this community was before things escalated.
Instead of accepting individual complaints one at a time, tenants across both properties eventually organized into a single tenants’ association, a legal structure DC law gives renters specifically so they can negotiate and push back collectively. That, according to the lawsuit, is where things reportedly turned adversarial.
Retaliation, allegedly, in real time
The complaint lays out a pattern that prosecutors say was designed to suppress organizing rather than fix anything. When tenants held meetings, the lawsuit alleges the landlords threatened to call the police on them. When residents rallied to draw attention to conditions, the suit says someone played loud music specifically to drown out their voices during the demonstration. And when the tenants’ association coordinated with the attorney general’s office to get inspectors on site, the suit alleges the association’s president and vice president were served eviction notices shortly after.
Tenants were also allegedly warned against letting Office of the Attorney General staff into the buildings at all, and pressured to cut ties with the volunteer organizers helping coordinate the association’s efforts. If proven, that combination of housing code violations paired with direct pressure on the people trying to fix them is exactly the kind of pattern DC’s tenant protection laws were written to catch.
What the lawsuit is asking for
The attorney general’s office is suing under DC’s Tenant Receivership Act, its Construction Codes, and the Consumer Protection Procedures Act, and is seeking a mix of remedies: court-ordered repairs to the properties, restitution for affected tenants, damages, and civil penalties against the Khans and their companies. A receivership action, specifically, can eventually put a building’s repairs and management under third-party control if a landlord is found unable or unwilling to maintain it, a significant escalation beyond a routine code violation citation.
Neither the Khans nor their companies have publicly responded to the specific allegations at the time of filing, and the case remains in the early stages of litigation, which DC News Now also reported following the filing. What’s notable here isn’t just the state of the buildings, which unfortunately isn’t unheard of in aging rental stock. It’s the layer on top: a landlord accused of directly targeting the tenants who tried to use the legal tools available to them. Tenants’ associations exist under DC law precisely because organizing collectively gives renters leverage they don’t have individually, and eviction notices arriving right after tenants invite government inspectors in is the kind of timing that tends to draw a prosecutor’s attention.
For the roughly 96 households across these two buildings, the lawsuit represents a chance at real repairs backed by court authority rather than another unanswered work order. It’s also a reminder that in a rental market where switching apartments isn’t cheap or easy, tenants who do organize are taking on real risk if a landlord decides to respond with pressure instead of plumbers.
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