One morning, Sarah Kish woke up and couldn’t breathe. After a fit of wheezing, she rushed to the store to buy an inhaler. She didn’t have time to go to a doctor – she had an exam that day.

Kish, a junior studio art major, soon developed an irregular cough and could taste blood in her mouth. When she began to notice a foul stench wafting through her Knox Box apartment, she sensed something was wrong.

“It smelled like an ecosystem,” she said.

After months of discomfort, she called in a team of experts, who punctured through the walls and discovered the cause of Kish’s symptoms: black mold.

The inspectors uncovered hazardous amounts of the spores – reports from Gorman Management, which manages the Knox Box apartments, detailed mold counts of 300 outside the apartments and more than 3,000 inside, according to resident Chelsea Kajs.

The conditions prompted Kish and other ailing residents in two other Knox Box apartments on Guilford Drive to book hotel rooms and immediately evacuate.

But Property Manager Gosia Sylla wrote in a March 15 email to Kajs that “levels detected are considered normal fungal ecology,” and insisted the apartment was habitable. Sylla could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Even though several residents filed complaints with Gorman Management, Kish said the company initially refused to acknowledge the dangers of the mold, instead calling it “livable mold,” and declined to show residents evidence of a mold inspection they had promised to perform.

Management eventually responded to resident concerns after Kish’s mother alerted the City of College Park of the mold outbreak, Kish said. Two weeks ago, the city ordered management to remove the mold in 30 days or risk being shut down, according to Kish. Public Services Director Bob Ryan said he could neither confirm nor deny this order. Kish said she believes management altered the results of the mold inspection.

“When they were doing the [mold test], they set up air purifiers in everybody’s apartment, which would change the results of the test,” Kish said, adding that her symptoms have forced her to miss classes. “I actually told them that I needed the report for school to show teachers and they were like, ‘No, sorry, we’re not going to give that to you.'”

Kajs said she first noticed mold spores seeping through her bathroom ceiling in September. Upon returning from winter break in late January, she started falling asleep frequently and found it difficult to concentrate. She decided she would front the $300 cost for a private mold inspector.

“We wanted to make sure we weren’t blowing this out of proportion,” Kajs said. “When he came in, he said we were at the highest toxic mold level, that it was unsafe to live there and that it had been there for four to five years.”

“What they claimed to be safe, our mold inspector said was completely unsafe,” she added.

Although Sylla wrote in a March 15 email to Kish that “test results … showed no presence of black mold,” Kish’s symptoms flared up again when she moved back in eight days later.

“I went inside my apartment and right away, my throat started hurting, my eyes were burning,” she said, adding that a doctor advised her at an April 4 visit to the University Health Center to evacuate her apartment. “The doctor that I saw said, ‘Tell them they need to move you out of that apartment.'”

And while evacuating the apartments may quell the immediate symptoms, Kajs said she worries about the long-term effects the mold may have on her body.

She and Kish both plan to schedule appointments at The Johns Hopkins Hospital to receive diagnostic testing. They both are considering suing Gorman Management.

“They’re going to run a whole bunch of tests on our lungs and our breathing, and if there are [long-term effects], I’m going to be suing our landlord,” Kajs said. “Because they need to be paying for our medical bills.”

Kajs hopes to spread awareness of the hazardous mold she believes could still fester in some Knox Box apartments.

“I honestly would never live there again, and I would not recommend anyone live there until they get a mold test,” Kajs said. “If I knew about the situation, I never would have moved in to begin with.”

foley@umdbk.com