Navy veteran fights homeowners association after tree falls on his house

The monster stood 78 feet tall. It measured just more than 40 inches across its midsection and scared them for decades. Looming. Throwing shade.

In July 1996, they notified the authorities they were in danger. Lela Grossack pulled out the paperwork she kept, an official report she filed with the Casta Del Sol homeowners association more than 23 years ago.

“I was afraid of it because it was so large,” Lela said.

And it was sneaky. The Grossacks noticed the monster, which had hovered over them all these years, had also slipped under their house, as if it was trying to get a grip on the entire structure, from above and below. They could see the thing when they had their plumbing fixed. Its tentacles had stretched beneath both toilets.

Lela said no one listened to the Grossacks’ pleas for help.

And then, the monster struck.

In the early morning hours of New Year’s Day of 2019, it nearly killed Steven Grossack. He was asleep in his master bedroom when it came crashing through the roof.

“I thought it was an earthquake,” Steven said with a weak and raspy voice. He is 79 (“I feel like 189,” he said) and suffers from emphysema. “Happy New Year.”

The monster was an Aleppo pine tree.

The wind that day was 17 miles per hour, said the attorney representing the Grossacks. It was not raining. The tree was not hit by a car. It was not pushed.

It just simply fell.

The tree had stood, when it was upright, on property owned and managed by Casta Del Sol, not the Grossacks. The tree’s ownership is not in question. Its heavy branches left a giant hole in the Spanish-tiled roof of the Grossacks’ home on Via Benavente in Mission Viejo.

The tree landed just a few feet from where Steven slept.

“This is everybody’s nightmare,” said Sherry Bragg, one of the attorneys representing the Grossacks.

Secrets and scares

Death can’t seem to catch up to Steven Grossack.

In 1958, he was assigned to the Wasp CVS18, an aircraft carrier chasing Russian submarines. It was a time when America was between the Korean and the Vietnam wars.

“Everything we did was top secret,” Steven said.

On Aug. 19, 1959, there was an explosion on board, an incident made more dangerous by the fact that the Wasp was carrying nuclear weapons. It was reported as a helicopter explosion, which Steven said was a cover story. Even today, he won’t reveal the real cause of the blast.

Steven was not on the carrier at the time. He was stateside, in the hospital with hepatitis.

He left the Navy in 1959 with an honorable, medical discharge.

While he was in the Navy, he was set up on a blind date with a girl named Lela. He took her to dinner and a movie in Brookline, Massachusetts, not far from where they both grew up.

They were quite a young couple. He got a job repairing electronics, even some early computers. She sold makeup. In their free time, they auditioned for local theater. They were in “Sound of Music” together. They hosted a radio show.

They were married in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1963.

Over the years, Steven has been diagnosed with, treated for and beaten cancer – twice. First, he had prostate cancer, then lung cancer. Currently, he has a growth on his pancreas, and he is awaiting test results. He thinks it may be cancer.

“It’s kind of nerve-racking,” he said.

The cold weather eventually drove them out of Massachusetts.

They came to California in 1984, moving first to Costa Mesa before settling in Mission Viejo.

The monster tree had been sitting on the slope behind the house on Via Benavente since the 1960s. In the last decade, it had turned completely brown because it was no longer being watered, the Grossacks said.

‘Beyond mad’

The Grossacks have health insurance, but they don’t have homeowners insurance. They said it was too expensive. They chose paying for food over paying for insurance, Steve said.

Janet L.S. Powers, who represents the Casta Del Sol homeowners association, said that’s the entire problem here.

“The Grossacks should have carried their own insurance,” Powers said. “They made a gamble that nothing would happen to their house.”

Powers said the falling tree was “an act of God” and that the homeowners association “has great empathy for the Grossacks.”

“But we don’t have a legal obligation,” she said. “Casta Del Sol was not negligent.”

Steven hopes to add the Casta Del Sol homeowners association, along with cancer, to the list of things he has beaten.

The Grossacks filed a claim asking for Casta Del Sol to admit responsibility and to fix the structural damage to the house.

On Jan. 18, the Grossacks received a letter from Sedgwick Claims Management, the insurance adjuster for the homeowners association. The letter said the falling tree was “outside the care and control” of the homeowners association. It said there was no evidence of negligence, disease or decay that caused the tree to fall.

“We have been instructed to deny your claim for damages,” the letter read.

“This is ridiculous,” Lela said. “I was beyond mad.”

The Grossacks have a giant blue tarp over the roof of their home. They live inside with a breeze and drips from recent rains coming into the house through a hole in the roof. They figure it will cost about $70,000 to fix their home.

Word got to City Hall and specifically Community Services Supervisor Leslie McDonald that the Grossacks, who have volunteered on Mission Viejo committees for years, needed help. McDonald called the Veterans Legal Institute.

“This should have been an open-and-shut case,” said Johnanthony Alaimo, an attorney at the VLI. “Their home was completely devastated.”

This is the first major case for Alaimo, a recent graduate of UCI. He partnered with Bragg, an experienced attorney with Weintraub Tobin. They are working the Grossack case for free.

VLI quickly jumped on the Grossack case, hoping to keep the elderly couple from becoming homeless. Luckily, their house was not condemned. They stayed in local hotels for a couple days (paid for by Casta Del Sol) but have chosen to move back inside their home, despite the hole in the roof and the cold and wet conditions.

Antoinette Balta is the president and co-founder of the Veterans Legal Institute, a nonprofit that specializes in representing veterans with nowhere else to turn. Balta raised $500 – through a donation from another veteran – to pay for a tree expert to investigate what happened.

Arbortist Chris Meador found the tree had been attacked by borer beetles and looked “sick,” had not been watered regularly and had a barrier constructed to block the roots, rendering it unstable. Meador found the soil around the tree was dry and interviewed a neighbor who said there had been no irrigation around the tree for years.

“The defects I noted would lead me to rate this tree a hazard and recommend removal had I observed it prior to failure,” Meador wrote in his report.

Powers said Casta Del Sol has not seen the report.

“I feel a little sandbagged here,” she said. “We’re hearing about it from a reporter’s phone call to an attorney.”

Balta also put the Grossacks in touch with Jeanine El Melki, a contractor. El Melki has begun rebuilding the Grossacks’ home at a reduced cost. The Grossacks are appealing their claim in hopes that Casta Del Sol will pay for the repair work.

The Veterans Legal Institute lawyers “are fantastic,” Steven said.

“It’s the first time being a veteran ever paid off.”