Residents of the 4-story house on Eddy Street once called home by now-famed smack addict and Cornell student Keri Blakinger may finally feel a reprieve. Blakinger, who was arrested earlier this week with over $150,000 of heroin, has had a history of disrupting living conditions around the house for the other 14 residents.
Tenants of the building told The Cornell Review Wednesday that Blakinger and her boyfriend, who lived in the basement, frequently left hypodermic needles laying around and were often fighting loudly inside the building.
“They live in the basement and would go to other floors and start fighting and start going at it. There were some other people she used to do drugs with in the building,” one resident said. “They would beat each other up.”
At one point, Blakinger left her room open allowing a resident to see that she was cooking heroin in the basement. The first floor bathroom was littered with needles and Blakinger often conducted what students suspected to be drug deals on the premises.
“Everyone knew in the building she was an addict, it was obvious. People used to come to meet with her and their trucks would block the driveway. All times of the day people would block the driveway so we couldn’t get out. How are you supposed to ask a drug dealer to move their car?”
Several students asked her to get help, and many wanted to move out. On November 9th, a student sent an email to the house listserv, which asked the person to stop the behavior.
“This week, both Sunday and Monday morning, I have found carelessly discarded hypodermic needles in the first floor bathroom. On Sunday it was an unused needle that was mixed in with my bathroom toiletries, and today it was a used needle left out on the sink,” the author said in the email, pointing out that the needles pop up between 1:00 AM and 9:00 AM. Later that day, the resident sent another email that included the landlord, Al Rosa, on the conversation.
“I will give you the benefit of the doubt,” the student tells the landlord, “and assume that you are completely oblivious to these aforementioned trends. But the time has come that there needs to be a dialogue on how to rectify some of these situations.”
Blakinger’s boyfriend allegedly lives in the house with her, even though he is not a Cornell student. In March 2009, Ithaca SWAT raided a house on the same block of Eddy street for a suspected heroin den, but nobody was arrested. IvyGate has reported that it was Blakinger’s boyfriend’s residence at the time. The landlord’s website says the house is for Cornell students only.
“The realtor threatened to kick out whoever he found with needles, but he lives in Florida, what can he possibly do? It’s obvious who the culprit is but nothing has been done,” a resident told The Review.
Oliver Renick is an editor of the Cornell Review and blogs at the Cornell Insider.
Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter
Please join the conversation about our stories on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, MeWe, Rumble, Gab, Minds and Gettr.