Merrillville hotels serving displaced victims of the June 11 tornado may be at risk of getting shut down if town inspectors can corroborate issues that have been brought to town officials.
A few residents who lost their housing appeared in person or sent representatives on their behalf to the June 23rd Merrillville Town Council meeting and pleaded with it to do anything on their behalf. They described untenable conditions and fluctuating hotel rates appearing to take advantage of people who can’t afford better.
One woman, Ashley Carmichael, described her family’s stay at the Baymont at Wyndham, 8375 Georgia St., as a complete nightmare that forced her family of six to sleep in their car. Having moved to Merrillville after a house fire displaced them from Chicago last year, her family was just settling in when the storm hit, she said.
Affordable local hotels were completely booked for two nights after the storm, Carmichael said, so the family slept in the car until she checked the Wyndham app and found a room at the Baymont by Wyndham. From the moment a rude hotel clerk checked them in, the situation got worse.
We were like, “Okay, kids, we’re going to go up here, and we’re going to get in and take a nice hot shower, and we’re going to lay down and we’re going to finally relax … just to get up there and there’s no towels, and the water in the shower sprinkles, it barely works,” Carmichael said. “So, then I go back downstairs, and now one of the housekeepers are down there and I said, ‘Can we get some towels?’ And she said, ‘What room are you in?’; I said, ‘I’m in room 320.’ She said, ‘Okay, because towels don’t come with the rooms because people steal towels’.”
After the housekeeper gave the family two regular sized towels and four hand towels, they showered and tried to go to sleep. That’s when the biting started, she said.
“Now me and my children are sleeping in this bed, we wake up and we all scratching,” Carmichael said. “We all got bite marks. We all just swelled up, everything, and so I went to the front desk and I told them, ‘I think there’s something in the room that’s biting us or I don’t know if we’re allergic to the bedding or something like that.’ They gave me sheets to put on the bed and said, ‘Okay, well, just change the sheets and maybe it’s just that. Just change the sheets.’ I said, ‘Okay’.”
After also procuring a vacuum and mop from housekeeping, Carmichael cleaned the room and changed the sheets, only for her family to get bitten up again, she said.
“The next night it happened again, and I’m just like, ‘Okay, no, this isn’t right,’ to the point where now I can’t sleep because I feel like I’m being bit,” she said. “I caught one in my hand: the biggest bedbug I have ever seen, and the first thing I did was I went straight downstairs and I told them, ‘I just got bit by bedbugs. Me and my children have been complaining to you all about these bite marks and stuff, and you all are just telling us, ‘Oh, it’s nothing. It’s nothing. It’s nothing.’ But then now I’ve caught one and now I have pictures, and they tell me, ‘Oh, well, unfortunately, there’s nothing that we can do because we’re completely booked, so I can’t put you on another room.’ Not an apology. There was no sympathy. There was nothing but just brushed it off.”
Carmichael said she told the family they were going back to the car, but her husband pointed out that they would likely be taking bedbugs with them. She was despondent at that point.
“Now my whole right arm has been eaten up, and I said, ‘Okay, this can’t be life. This can’t be life,’” she said. “So I’m on my phone at 3:00 in the morning and reading the reviews, and there’s a review on there that said they were at the Baymont on June 8th, and they stayed in a room 320 where at 1:00 in the morning they were awakened by being bit by bedbugs … they were saying on their review, ‘They did nothing. They didn’t want to compensate us. We reached out to everyone else, even through Trivago, and Trivago even reached out on their behalf, and still nothing. So, now I’m just like, okay, well, they had to have known this.”
Since then, Carmichael, who lost her job shortly before the tornado hit, reached out and sent her evidence to the town, local news outlets and the hotel’s corporate channels but has heard nothing back, she said. She and her family have received some help here and there, but the hotel has now held on to her deposit and keeps trying to deduct more money, she said.
“Even after I checked out, they were still trying to charge my card, and I had to lock my bank card. Every time, it was every 10 minutes they would try to get me for $80, $80, $80,” Carmichael said. “I’m just like, at this point, I don’t think anyone cares. I don’t think anyone cares, and it shouldn’t be like that.”
Two other women, Thea Marshall and Cachet Griffin, told the council about another woman who they said was removed from a substandard hotel room and had her belongings stolen.
“The standards of these hotels are insane. We have a tornado victim that paid up and got back to her (room) using the key card to find all of her belongings removed from her room. Her key card still works, but they kept all the food that I sent to this friend for her and her baby,” Marshall said. “She could barely close her hotel room door. She can’t see through the peephole. There’s water damage everywhere. There’s bedbugs. There’s mucus on the side of the wall. We’ve called the health department. We’ve been told that … an investigation (was) done, but they didn’t find anything. There’s no way that was cleaned up in this time.
“We’re asking for you guys to go and obtain a real investigation. (The hotel staff said) we have the food because it don’t want to go bad; when it’s going to go bad is when she’s sleeping in a car here with her kids because she was illegally removed because you got upset because we had to complain about the conditions. But charging us $75 a night, $82 a night, $117 it was this past Friday a night for the standards with no air conditioner. The water in the shower sprinkles out, and you cannot refund somebody money. Call the police, have the police report. Did all of that, but it’s still not not making sense that we have to wait on funds, so I’m begging y’all to take a deeper investigation to the Baymont and Sweet Home Merrillville because there’s no way that they should be able to put somebody out illegally and get away with it and keep this girl’s money.”
Griffin echoed her friend’s comments.
“Every officer that came out told us that they’re out there every single day. We’ve had the opportunity to have some in-depth conversations. They are beyond frustrated. And they say that these happens on a regular basis. So how does it keep happening and they’re still open? How is it that they’re getting citations and they’re still open? Something has to be done,” Griffin added.
The Post-Tribune reached out to the Wyndham Hotels & Resorts’ corporate office for comment but didn’t receive a response by deadline.
Council President Rick Bells, D-5, said that while the victims’ issues with their money being held are civil matters that the town can’t involve itself, it certainly can look into the living conditions.
“We’ll find out from the Lake County Health Department the kind of reports these places have been getting, and we’ll have our Fire Inspector recheck some of the complaints about no fire alarms. If there’s a problem there, we’ll close the hotels until they fix the issues,” he said.
The town does have an ordinance passed in 2024 that allows all hotels in Merrillville three “false alarm” calls every three months; after three false alarms, the offending hotel will be fined $250 per false alarm, with any business or residence having more than three police calls for service during any quarter of a calendar year may pay a fine of $500” for each call over three, Merrillville Police Chief Kosta Nuses said. But that doesn’t necessarily focus on room condition, he said.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
