Business Owner Livid When City Fines Him for Refusing To Clean Up Homeless People's Feces
As if dealing with homeless people defecating on his property wasn’t enough, a Denver businessman is now being faced with a citation from the city.
Jawaid Bazyar, the CEO of an internet service provider in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood, has been finding human feces on his property almost daily, KDVR reported Friday.
“This is a bathroom stall,” he said. “They just kinda lean up against the wall here and let it rip.”
“In downtown Denver, that’s nonstop now, just piles of poop.”
Bazyar has also encountered syringes on the ground, and on Friday he recorded what appeared to be a drug deal taking place outside his office.
He said his employees have even been accosted and harassed.
“I’ve been chased with a 2-by-4, I’ve been chased with a knife, a pipe, and he took a rock, bashed in my whole windshield,” employee Tamara Chapman said.
Though Bazyar has called police repeatedly, his complaints have brought about no change.
“There have been periods where we will literally call 10 times a day,” he said.
Now, the businessman has stopped cleaning up the feces, leading to a citation from the city health department.
“It’s a biohazard. We don’t know, it could be infectious,” he said. “I didn’t hire these people to clean poop off the ground.”
The health department argued that feces removal was not its responsibility because the mess was on private property.
But that response does little to help Bazyar.
“Like I’m the bad guy, right, like I’m not the one doing this,” he told KDVR.
“And they won’t do anything about the people committing crimes.
“They’ll bring people by and paint over the graffiti, that’s a city program. But they won’t do the stuff that’s literally a health hazard.”
Bazyar decried the government’s inaction as a political problem.
“I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do,” he said. “The government’s primary job is public safety.”
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