Two Davenport women are charged with robbery and first-degree murder in the stabbing of a 28-year-old man Monday morning. The incident happened at a Davenport apartment house that’s been the subject of hundreds of police calls a year. City housing inspector Mike Farris says his staff has also done a lot of work at the building. They inspected the building in November 2002 and came up with a list of violations, then returned later to find that many of the fire-code violations had been corrected. By the time a deadline extension was granted, Farris says the building’s owners had corrected every item on the list — 275 of them. Owners of the Ledo, formerly called the Schricker Apartments, complained that the city was unfairly targeting the building but Farris says the Inspections department has the job of making sure that owners meet certain standards when they rent to people who aren’t related to them. Fairly often, he says, they find dangerous things, and often the owner and tenant simply don’t know they pose a risk, like an electrical hazard. They’re minimum standards and Farris says it’s not a tough code to meet if an owner does normal maintenance and care of the building and apartments. City officials talked about a special levy to offset the cost of all the police calls to the building but never reached a decision. Just in the last year, a child fell from a third-floor window and died at that building, a woman shot and killed another woman, and a woman was charged with dropping two babies out a back window to avoid social workers coming to take them to a foster home. The women charged with murder in this week’s incident are accused of demanding money from their victim in exchange for drugs and sex.
