When Ansel Postell — an honors student at Benedict College — returned to Columbia to start a new school year in July 2022, he was stunned to find his landlord had emptied his apartment and given his belongings away .
After all, Postell’s mother had paid the rental company $3,810 for six months advance rent. His things were not supposed to be tossed.
When the company — Campus Advantage, known as The Rowan — proved unresponsive to requests to compensate him for the missing possessions, Postell sued. The Rowan is a sprawling complex of hundreds of apartments between Bluff and Shop roads.
And Thursday after a Richland County jury deliberated three hours, it awarded Postell $692,000 in damages for wrongs he alleged in his lawsuit. The $692,000 included $230,000 for actual damages and $462,500 in punitive damages, according to the jury form.
“I’m glad I was given the opportunity for this to be taken up in court, and the jury was able to make a decision on the evidence that we provided,” Postell said in an interview with The State newspaper on Friday. He said he graduated magna cum laude from Benedict in May with a major in cybersecurity.
Postell’s missing possessions included all his clothes, electronic equipment, a television and a sophisticated computer he had built himself that had a replacement value of $6,000 or more, according to court testimony.
Although the company initially admitted its error, it refused subsequent requests by Postell and his mother, Shawndolena Postell, to give him any compensation at all for his missing possessions, according to his lawsuit.
Having to deal with replacing missing items and the lack of responses by The Rowan “required so much of his time that Postell was unable to attend classes at Benedict College for several of the first few days of (the) semester, placing his semester’s performance in jeopardy and also risking several scholarships and benefits for which Postell had previously earned,” his lawsuit said.
Todd Lyle, the Lexington attorney who represented Postell, said in an interview with The State that because the jury found Campus Advantage liable for violating South Carolina’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, Postell will be entitled at least to triple damages of some or all of the $692,000 total award.
Lyle said the defense strategy seemed to portray Postell and his mother as fabricating the amount of possessions that went missing. But Postell’s evidence included emails and a list of belongings in the apartment he and his mother drew up at the time they discovered the loss.
Two years ago, Lyle offered to settle the case for $75,000, according to court records.
Under the law, the defendants will now have to pay two years’ of interest at 8% a year on Thursday’s verdict, Lyle said.
“They could have paid $75,000 two years ago and been done with it,” Lyle said.
Several months ago, the defendants offered to settle for $7,500,” Lyle said. “It just shows how out of touch they were.”
The trial lasted four days. Judge Milton Kimpson presided.
The case holds a lesson for landlords.
“Almost half a million dollars in punitive damages is sending a huge message,” Lyle said. “This case could have been settled for far less, but their obstinance and insistence that they did no wrong ultimately drove this verdict as high as it did,” Lyle said.
Besides finding a violation of the Unfair Trade Practices Act, the jury found the rental company liable for unlawfully seizing Postell’s property, breach of a rental contract and negligence in failing to supervise their employees.
Defendants’ lawyers Charles Blackburn and Timothy VanDenBerg had no comment response to the verdict.
