I was sitting in the back row of courtroom 4B watching a landlord sue his tenant for unpaid rent — and the tenant, this tiny old woman in a cardigan, stood up and said, “Your Honor, I’d like to REPRESENT MYSELF.”
My name is Danielle, and I’m thirty-four. I’m a court reporter between assignments, so I sometimes sit in on civil cases to stay sharp with my shorthand.
The landlord was a guy named Rick Lassiter. Big guy, expensive suit, two attorneys flanking him like bodyguards. He owned half the rental properties in Garfield County.
The tenant was a woman named Mabel Voss. Seventy-one years old, maybe five feet tall. She had a canvas tote bag instead of a briefcase.
She looked like someone’s grandmother who’d wandered in from a church potluck.
Rick’s lead attorney, a guy named Bryce Kendall, barely looked at her. He was smirking the entire time he laid out the case — three months of unpaid rent, property damage, lease violations.
He talked to her like she was a child.
“Ma’am, do you understand what a counterclaim even is?”
Mabel just nodded. Then she opened her tote bag and pulled out a manila folder.
That’s when things shifted.
She started asking Bryce questions about the property’s inspection history. Specific questions. Dates, permit numbers, code sections. She cited them from memory.
Bryce’s smirk disappeared.
I looked at the judge. He was leaning forward.
Mabel produced photographs of black mold in the bathroom, a collapsed ceiling panel, an electrical junction box with no cover. She laid them out one by one, each in a clear plastic sleeve, each labeled with a date stamp and a witness signature.
“Mr. Kendall,” she said calmly, “are you aware your client collected rent on a unit that failed municipal inspection FOUR TIMES in two years?”
Rick whispered something to Bryce. Bryce didn’t answer.
Then Mabel pulled out a second folder. This one was thick.
She handed it to the judge. “Your Honor, this is a consolidated complaint on behalf of TWENTY-THREE TENANTS in Mr. Lassiter’s properties. I prepared it myself.”
The judge opened it.
I watched his eyebrows rise.
“Ma’am,” he said slowly, “what exactly did you do before you retired?”
Mabel smiled. “I was chief counsel for the State Housing Authority for TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS.”
THE COLOR DRAINED FROM RICK LASSITER’S FACE. His chair scraped back. Bryce grabbed his arm.
I sat there with my mouth open.
Mabel wasn’t done. She reached into that canvas tote bag one more time and set a sealed envelope on the judge’s bench.
“That,” she said quietly, “is from the attorney general’s office. They asked me to deliver it personally.”
The judge broke the seal, read for about ten seconds, then looked directly at Rick Lassiter and said, “Mr. Lassiter, I’d advise you to call your criminal defense attorney.”
Rick stood up so fast his water glass shattered on the floor.
Mabel turned around, looked right past me toward the back of the courtroom, and said to someone I couldn’t see: “You can come in now.”
The double doors opened behind me.
Two State Investigators and a Woman with a Lanyard
Three people walked in. Two men in dark suits, one woman in a gray blazer with a state ID badge clipped to her lapel. The woman had a rolling file case. The kind you see at depositions, not at a Tuesday morning landlord-tenant hearing in a county courthouse that smells like floor wax and burnt coffee.
One of the men handed a card to the bailiff. The bailiff looked at it, then looked at the judge. Didn’t say anything. Just walked it up to the bench.
The judge read it.
“Counsel for both parties, approach.”
Bryce stood up. His co-counsel, a younger woman whose name I never caught, stood up half a second later. They walked to the bench like they were walking into traffic.
There was no counsel for Mabel to send, of course. She just sat there with her hands folded on the table, her canvas tote bag zipped shut now, like she’d packed away her whole performance and was waiting for the next act.
I could hear Bryce’s voice, low and tight. “Your Honor, we were not given notice of any—”
“Mr. Kendall.” The judge cut him off. Not loud. Just final. “Sit down.”
Bryce sat.
I’ve watched a lot of proceedings. Hundreds. And I can tell you that the specific silence that followed, where the judge is reading something and nobody in the room moves or breathes, is the worst kind of silence there is. Because somebody’s life is about to change, and nobody knows whose yet.
Except Mabel knew. She absolutely knew.
How I Found Out Who Mabel Really Was
I didn’t talk to Mabel that day. She left through a side door with the state investigators. Rick Lassiter left through the main doors with Bryce, walking fast, not talking to each other.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
I went home that night to my apartment on Birch Street (which, by the way, is in one of the few rental complexes in Garfield County that Rick Lassiter does NOT own) and I started looking her up.
Mabel Voss. It took me about forty-five minutes to piece together a career that most people in the county had never heard of.
She’d joined the State Housing Authority in 1981. Started as a staff attorney reviewing compliance paperwork. By 1989 she was leading enforcement actions. By 1996 she was chief counsel, which meant she oversaw every habitability complaint, every code enforcement referral, every landlord prosecution that came through the state system for over a decade.
She retired in 2009. Quietly. No press release. No farewell dinner that I could find.
And then she moved into one of Rick Lassiter’s units on Poplar Avenue.
I sat with that for a minute.
A woman who spent twenty-eight years prosecuting slumlords moved into a slumlord’s building.
I didn’t think it was an accident. Not after what I saw in courtroom 4B.
The Part Nobody Saw Coming (Including Me)
I went back to the courthouse the next Wednesday. Not for a case. I went because the clerk’s office posts civil filings on a public board near the elevator, and I wanted to see if anything new had been filed under Lassiter’s name.
There were four new filings.
Four.
One was the consolidated complaint Mabel had presented, now formally docketed. Twenty-three tenants, eleven properties. Allegations included failure to remediate hazardous conditions, fraudulent inspection certifications, retaliatory eviction attempts, and — this was the one that made me read it twice — misrepresentation of property conditions to the county assessor’s office for tax purposes.
That last one isn’t a civil matter. That’s criminal.
The second filing was a motion from the attorney general’s office to intervene. Which meant the state was now a party. Which meant Rick Lassiter wasn’t just fighting Mabel anymore. He was fighting the state of Colorado.
The third was a temporary restraining order preventing Lassiter or his management company from initiating any eviction proceedings against any of the twenty-three tenants until the consolidated case was resolved.
The fourth was Bryce Kendall’s motion to withdraw as counsel.
I actually laughed. Out loud, in the hallway, by myself.
Bryce was jumping ship.
The Woman at the Coffee Cart
I ran into Mabel two weeks later. Not at the courthouse. At the coffee cart outside the county library on a Thursday morning. She was ordering a small black coffee and a blueberry muffin. She had on the same cardigan. Maybe a different one. Same color, though. Oatmeal beige.
I don’t usually approach strangers. But I’d been carrying this around for two weeks and I couldn’t help it.
“Ms. Voss? My name’s Danielle. I was in courtroom 4B when you—”
“I know who you are,” she said. Not unfriendly. Just matter-of-fact. “You’re the one who takes shorthand in the back row.”
I must have looked surprised.
“Honey, I spent thirty years reading rooms. You think I didn’t notice the only person in the gallery writing things down?”
She asked if I wanted to sit. There was a bench by the book return. We sat.
She told me things I hadn’t expected.
She told me she’d moved into the Poplar Avenue unit on purpose. That she’d heard about Lassiter’s properties from a former colleague, a woman named Pam Gunderson who worked code enforcement for the county and had been filing complaints about Lassiter’s buildings for years. Complaints that kept getting lost. Closed without action. Reclassified as “resolved.”
Pam had called Mabel in 2021. Said she was getting nowhere. Said she thought someone in the county inspector’s office was on Lassiter’s payroll.
Mabel could have made some calls. Could have written a letter. Could have contacted the AG’s office from her kitchen table.
Instead she signed a lease.
“I needed to see it myself,” she said. “I needed to be a tenant. Not an attorney. Not a former state official. A seventy-year-old woman paying rent.”
She lived in that unit for two years. Documented everything. The mold. The wiring. The heating system that died every January. The maintenance requests that went unanswered. The rent increases that came anyway.
She talked to her neighbors. Slowly. Carefully. People who didn’t trust officials because officials had never helped them.
“You know what I told them?” she said, pulling a piece off her muffin. “I told them I was just a retired lady who was tired of her toilet running. That’s all I told them for the first six months.”
She earned their trust by being one of them. By standing in the same leaking hallway, calling the same management office, getting the same runaround.
By month eight, they were showing her things. Photos on their phones. Text messages from the property manager threatening eviction if they called the health department. One woman, a single mother named Teresa Molina who lived on the third floor, had a four-year-old with chronic respiratory problems. Teresa had taken the kid to the ER three times in one winter. Mold in the bedroom wall. She’d reported it. Got a text back that said, “We’ll send someone.” Nobody came.
Mabel kept all of it. Every photo, every text screenshot, every unanswered maintenance request. She organized it the way she’d organized state enforcement cases for three decades. Dated. Cross-referenced. Witnessed.
She built the case the way you build a house. Foundation first.
What Happened to Rick Lassiter
I kept following the filings. By March, Lassiter had hired a new attorney. A criminal defense lawyer from Denver named Howard Pruitt. Expensive. The kind of lawyer whose name you recognize from news coverage of white-collar cases.
It didn’t matter.
The AG’s office had been building their own case parallel to Mabel’s. What she’d handed the judge that day in courtroom 4B was a formal notice of investigation. But the investigation had started months before, triggered by the same complaints Pam Gunderson had been filing, which Mabel had quietly forwarded to a contact she still had in the attorney general’s office. A woman named Janet Cho, who’d been a junior attorney under Mabel back in the nineties.
The state’s case was broader than Mabel’s. It included allegations of wire fraud related to federal housing assistance payments Lassiter had received for units that didn’t meet habitability standards. Federal money. Which meant federal interest.
By April, the FBI had opened an inquiry.
By June, Lassiter’s management company had filed for bankruptcy protection.
By August, Rick Lassiter was indicted on fourteen counts. State and federal. Tax fraud. Wire fraud. Willful violation of habitability codes resulting in bodily harm. That last one was for Teresa Molina’s son.
The kid’s name was Diego. He was five by then. Still using an inhaler.
The Last Thing She Said to Me
I saw Mabel one more time. September, outside the courthouse again. She was walking out of the building with Pam Gunderson. They were both carrying paper bags from the sandwich place on Third Street.
I waved. She waved back.
I jogged over because I wanted to ask her something that had been bugging me since the coffee cart.
“Ms. Voss, can I ask you something?”
“Mabel.”
“Mabel. When you stood up in courtroom 4B and said you wanted to represent yourself. When Bryce Kendall looked at you like you were nothing. Were you nervous?”
She took a bite of her sandwich. Chewed. Thought about it.
“Danielle, I was nervous every single day I lived in that apartment. Nervous the ceiling was going to fall on me in my sleep. Nervous the wiring was going to start a fire. Nervous that Teresa’s boy was going to end up in the hospital again and this time not come home.”
She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin.
“Standing up in a courtroom? That’s the easy part. I’ve been doing that since before you were born.”
Pam laughed. Mabel didn’t. She just folded the napkin, put it in her bag, and said, “You keep practicing that shorthand.”
They walked off toward the parking lot. Mabel’s canvas tote bag was slung over one shoulder. It looked empty now. Light.
I stood there on the courthouse steps for a while. My hands were shaking and I wasn’t sure why.
Then I went home and wrote all of this down.
—
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If you’re interested in more stories about unexpected twists in everyday life, you might enjoy reading about My Mother’s Financial Advisor Responded in Nine Minutes or even My Niece Asked If Skin Turns Purple When Someone Loves You Too Much. And for another tale of quick decisions, check out I Installed a Nanny Cam and Came Back Inside in Forty-Five Seconds.
