Longtime Bed Stuy Family Fights to Save Home With Neighbors’ Support

A protest against the eviction of the longtime residents of a Bed Stuy brownstone turned into a chaotic scene Wednesday morning, where more than a dozen police and sheriff’s officers clashed with local residents, resulting in the violent arrest of the local council member and other neighbors trying to thwart the eviction.

The house at 212 Jefferson Avenue in Bed Stuy is at the center of an ownership struggle that stems from an heirs sale, which longtime resident Carmella Charrington and family members argue was fraudulent.

The Charrington family has owned the three-story brownstone for 60 years, Charrington said, and city records show a great uncle transferred the property to her father Allman Charrington and his sister in the 1980s. Carmella Charrington has lived in the house with her family — which includes her children and grandchildren — for more than 17 years.

In November 2023, city records show the house was sold by Leon Morrison and a number of supposed heirs, as well as Allman’s conservator in Georgia, to 227 Group LLC for $1.4 million. However, Charrington said her father was completely unaware of the house being sold, and the family, including her father who relocated from Georgia in 2020, was still living there. She said the other supposed heirs had no legal claim to sell the house and the conservator in Georgia failed to follow the law in selling Allman’s shares.

Before selling to 227 Group LLC, Morrison had entered a contract to sell the house to an LLC run by the speculator brothers Joseph and Elliot Ambalo and Etai Vardi, city records show, but that contract was canceled and the signatory for the new buyer, 227 Group LLC, is listed in records as Simon Blitz. Vardi told Brownstoner in 2024 the trio canceled the contract because “it’s so complex, and there is so much family history” involved in the house.

In July of 2024, 227 Group LLC filed an eviction case against Charrington, her family, and other tenants, which led to the eviction warrant being issued earlier this month and Wednesday’s hostile scene.

When officers arrived Wednesday to execute the warrant, Charrington had only been out of Rikers Island for a few hours, where she had been held for five days in connection to her father’s conservatorship case in Georgia. The family has been trying to get him out of the conservatorship, which Charrington argues has been abused by those controlling it in Georgia to liquidate his assets against his will.

Over the past two years Charrington has been fighting the sale and the resulting eviction case, as well as the conservatorship, and has garnered extensive community support including recently raising $26,625 through a GoFundMe to retain a lawyer.

The fight, she said, has taken a huge toll on her and the community, and she is hoping now with legal representation they can make some progress in the courts. “The community is here all the time, but this is so stressful for them, I’m so thankful, but neighbors are crying, people in the coalition, this is so traumatizing for everybody not just me it affects everyone, it is unreal,” she told Brownstoner Wednesday.

After more than two hours of attempting to quiet the protest and get into the house, which included changing the locks, taping eviction notices to the doors, and bringing in wooden boards to close off sections of the property, the NYPD, marshals, and sheriffs left. It’s unclear what prompted them to leave.

In a statement to Brownstoner, a spokesperson for the NYPD said the NYC Sheriff and NYC Marshals had an eviction warrant signed by a judge to carry out the eviction and to determine if Charrington’s father was on site. The rep said Allman Charrington is a ward of the state of Georgia and is supposed to be in Georgia. The rep said that due to the protestors, the marshals called the NYPD for backup and arrests were made after protestors blocked the entrance. Additionally, the spokesperson said, Charrington had been arrested on April 16 and detained for five days for not turning her father over to the courts.

City Council Member Chi Ossé said today in a post on Instagram that he has a concussion after being pushed by the officers onto the sidewalk, and will be filing a complaint. He said he was at the protest “because I could not, in good faith, allow the displacement of a Black family in my district” adding that Charrington’s legal measures “have not all been exhausted.”

“The legal specifics of her case are for the courts, and she deserves her due process, but someone should not be evicted without us having all the answers,” Ossé says in the video.

“And the pattern that this case sits inside is real estate speculators targeting heirs in Black neighborhoods, using legitimate looking paperwork to extract generational wealth from families who have lived in these homes for decades. Sometimes the perpetrators use illegal methods. Sometimes their methods are technically legal. In all cases, the practice is cruel and wrong, and everything that is legal isn’t right.”

He also said in the post, and in several other statements yesterday, that the governor needs to enact an eviction moratorium in cases where deed theft or fraud is alleged. “I have seen enough Black displacement in my life, and I refuse to abdicate my responsibility to ensure Black families can remain in their homes. My powers as a City Council member are limited. Let’s end deed theft.”

Earlier this year, Ossé, along with Charrington and members of The People’s Coalition to Stop Deed Theft, called on the governor to enact a temporary eviction moratorium on properties where deed theft or fraud was suspected. Governor Kathy Hochul has declined to back the proposal.

Heirs’ sales have had devastating impacts on the generational wealth of many longtime Brooklyn residents, often seniors, as well as those elsewhere in New York City, and across the country. Real estate speculators have been able to acquire properties in rapidly gentrifying Black and brown neighborhoods in complex transactions – sometimes legal, sometimes not – without the awareness or consent of longtime owners. Often the owners lack the financial resources to defend themselves in court, they say.

Even in cases where fraud is suspected, the burden of proof – and the cost of litigation – can fall to the longtime owners, who risk losing their homes and financial assets even if they did nothing wrong. Ultimately, the sales can lead to the eviction of any remaining family members who live in the home. Heirs sales and partition sales are legal and are not deed fraud in and of themselves, but there have been instances of alleged deed fraud in partition sales.

In response to the issue, New York made deed theft a crime in July 2024 and barred LLCs from forcing sales of longtime family homes. The state also made it illegal for LLCs to acquire or sell shares of houses without the knowledge or consent of other owners. The goal was “preserving intergenerational wealth, preserving communities, very much with a racial equity focus,” General Counsel for The Center for NYC Neighborhoods Scott Kohanowski, who helped write the legislation, told Brownstoner at the time.

In August 2025, Attorney General Letitia James brought the first criminal cases under New York’s deed theft statute. The same year, politicians and community advocates called on the City Council to dedicate $5 million toward legal assistance and outreach for victims. Between 2013 and 2023 more than 1,500 deed theft complaints were filed in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Paper reported, and only 30 convictions were made.

But with that, there’s talk in the community about judges and lawyers who seem biased against the longtime homeowners in such cases, and who question why the district attorneys and attorney general have not done more to help. Finding and paying for experienced litigators, who can cost up to $100,000 and are often needed in these cases, has also been a major issue for many homeowners struggling with possible deed fraud, including the Charringtons.

Charrington said she will continue fighting to stay in the Jefferson Avenue house, and it was clear on Wednesday that her neighbors would be there to support her with that. It was also clear the toll the eviction process can take not just on a single family or household, but on the entire fabric of a block.

As law enforcement left and the protest died down, neighbors talked about the trauma of the experience and how many would be filing complaints over the way the protest had been handled. Some mentioned filing legal action against the NYPD.

“We have to understand when we’re winning,” The Peoples Coalition Against Deed Theft member Evangeline Byars told the crowd. “We live to fight another day, they do not have possession of this property.”

[Photos by Anna Bradley-Smith]

Related Stories

• Neighbors Organize Against Deed Theft, Call Out Investors Who Target Heirs
• Court Allows Partition Sale of Bed Stuy Home in Family for 75 Years
• Deed Fraud Questions Arise in Case of Woman Fighting for East New York Home

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