Hurricane Matthew gave the people of Douglas and Coffee County an opportunity to show kindness and generosity to a large, diverse group of people in a state of great need. As we documented in an earlier story, the entire community rallied around those people who traveled to Douglas after being displaced by Matthew.
However, not everyone in town was looking out for the best interests of those in need. As early as noon Friday, I began hearing reports of one particular motel allegedly gouging potential customers, charging as much as $500 per night. Some refused to pay but others, realizing they had nowhere else to go, ponied up.
Local authorities got involved and did the best they could to stop the price gouging. Even when that stopped, there was still the matter of all sorts of illegal activities that routinely go on in and around this motel. What you will see below is a report from Jamie O’Quinn of Brunswick, who details her family’s stay at this particular motel. I’ve edited out any reference to exactly which local establishment she’s talking about. Suffice it to say that local law enforcement is well aware of what went on here and, how shall I say this, they have taken an even greater interest in the day-to-day activities of the motel.
Here is what Mrs. O’Quinn had to say about her stay during the evacuation. It’s fairly lengthy but I think you will find it very interesting:
On Thursday, October 6, 2016, around 7:30 a.m., I started calling hotels around Douglas for a place for my family to stay when we evacuated due to Hurricane Matthew. After calling about six hotels, all with the answer being, no rooms available, I spoke with one last hotel. The clerk said that they had rooms available and they had a special rate for people being evicted (I’m sure she meant evacuated, but…), the rate would be $62.60 per night for a double room. I looked at the 3.3 Google review and figured it wasn’t that bad, and we really needed somewhere to stay.
My husband, three daughters, my mother, and I headed from Brunswick to Douglas. We drove through the beautiful town of Douglas, then pulled into the parking lot of the motel and realized the horrible mistake we made.
We pulled up to the office and I went inside to check us in while my husband and children stayed in the truck with our dog. An older man and a younger woman were at the desk. I later learned the man was the owner, and his daughter-in-law. I gave my name, they had our room, but I asked if they had an extra room available, he said yes and the rate for that room would be $79.99 per night. The owner then answered the phone while the woman was helping me, I heard him tell whoever was on the phone that they had a two room suite. I asked her the cost of the suite, she asked the owner, and he said $129.99 per night. I choose that option so that we would have more room for six people, a dog, and a bird. The woman charged us $119.99 per night for two nights plus a $50 pet fee, $32.08 fee for using our debit card, and $28.82 in taxes, for a total of $352.88.
After being checked in and given our keys to room number 146, my family enters a room smelling strongly of bleach as two resident/housekeepers are removing a chair that may or may not have once held a dead body. The carpet was so stained with God knows what, the sheets, pillowcases, mattresses, the cushions on the couch, and the mattress on the fold out couch were also stained with the above, and the window sills were full of blowflies. As I pulled the sheets off of the beds, spiders ran out, the same was the case with the fold-out couch. The only good thing was that I could not find any bedbugs! We walked out of the room and determined that there was no way that we would stay in that disgusting room. We then spent the next hour calling every hotel within an hour and a half radius. After we were told that there were no vacancies anywhere else, we determined we had no other options. While making the calls, we watched some sort of prostitution operation go down in the room a few doors down! Our thoughts were, what have we gotten ourselves into.
I went back to the front desk and told them about the disgusting condition of the room, they offered us room 148. The condition of the new room was a slight bit better, but not much. Instead of blowflies and spiders, there were roaches. The floors were disgusting and covered in debris, the countertops in the kitchenette were covered with dead roaches and more unknown substances, the same with every other surface in the room, the mattresses and couches were also stained terribly.
Once we got it through our very thick skulls that we were stuck in this awful place, we made a list:
Tarps to put the air mattresses on
Towels
Washcloths
Toilet paper (because the 2 rolls the slide through the 2” crack at the front desk wasn’t going to cut it)
Paper towels
Bleach
Lysol
Clorox wipes
Sealed snacks
Sealed drinks
A $175Walmart trip later…Back at the room, we left the children, dog, and bird in the car and got to work. We removed all comforters, sprayed all hard surfaces with bleach, wiped them down with Clorox wipes, and sprayed the entire large can of Lysol on the couch, chairs, beds, pillows, and carpeting, and cleaned all of the roaches out of the refrigerator. We then remade all beds with the new bedding, put down the tarps and set up the air mattresses. I feel like this part of the story should be more intense, but there is only so much detail that you can go into about a two-hour cleaning frenzy. I can say that I ruined my favorite pair of shoes and one of my favorite t-shirts with bleach. The room was so disgusting, there was no way we could stay without doing all that we did.
We were so uncomfortable in our room during our stay, we spent most of our time outside with our kids playing in the small yard next to our room, so we saw a lot of the local foot traffic coming in and out of the property. As the parking lot started to fill with more evacuees, tags from Glynn, Camden, Brantley, Chatham, and Nassau counties, we started to feel a little more comfortable with our situation. The now-filled parking lot did not deter the locals from coming to visit the residents, or from my husband being asked if he wanted a prostitute, or later when my mother was asked if she wanted to buy some marijuana. The residents and their guests sit outside of their rooms, or on the stairs and smoke marijuana, not worried at all about the families with children of all ages. The housekeepers/residents all seem to be impaired by some substance every time we had to interact with them and the registered sex offender/maintenance man spent an hour coming in and out of our room to fix our televisions (which were then left out on the sidewalk outside our room during our whole stay). The status of the sex offender was unknown to us until one of the four police officers who visited multiple times during the day and nights informed us.
Even after all of the cleaning we did, I still wouldn’t let my children walk around without shoes. I also had to let the shower run for 20 minutes before brown water stopped coming out. When we left the property, we packed everything back into the car and took it with us.
We knew that this was not going to be a fun trip, but staying at this hotel made it absolutely awful. The conditions of the room and property, how we were price gouged with the cost of the room, and the rudeness and attitude from some of the employees when making basic hotel/motel requests, such as a Do Not Disturb sign to keep the housekeepers out of our room.
On Saturday morning when talk that Brunswick might be allowing residents to return, I went to the front desk to let them know that we knew that check-out time was 11:00, but we wouldn’t know if we could go back home until the county released a statement at 12:00, I asked if it was okay for us to have a late check-out, with the possibility of us to have to stay another night, the girl at the front desk said she would need to call HER and ask, while she was on the phone, she asked me to turn and look at the camera so that SHE could see if she recognized me, at that time we were told that we could stay until we knew if we could go home.
I can say that not our entire trip to the beautiful city of Douglas was terrible. We enjoyed a fabulous meal at Johnny’s New York Style Pizza, where an awesome t-shirt, sign-making business owner bought us dessert after learning that we were evacuees, coffee and bagels at the fun little drive-in Elliano’s, a day of shopping at Town Square Antique Mall and The Painted Lady, to name a few, where we met some wonderful locals who cared about our safety and comfort in Douglas and later when were able to go home, a delicious dinner at El 1800, where we enjoyed basketful after basketful of the best chips we’ve ever had, and the best donuts on the planet at Holt’s Bakery where the pastor from First Baptist Church bought our breakfast and offered us lunch at the shelter later that day.
I can thank all of the wonderful people that we met who didn’t want anything from us, they only wanted us the be able to safely return to a home that was still standing, but to the people who used this storm as a reason to STEAL from people who had to leave their homes due to an act of nature, such as the owner of this motel. I hope that my writing this, my documentation of your law breaking, and wrong doing, I hope that your business is shut down, I hope that karma catches up with you and you are left with nothing but the clothes on your back. You don’t deserve to be a business owner.
Thank you for listening,
Jamie O’Quinn
Brunswick, Ga.
During our stay, I asked some of the other guests how much they paid:
Over $600 for three nights plus a fee for living in Georgia
$75 per night, no pet fee—single
$150 per night—suite
$99 per night—single
Over $400—suite
$99 per night, that price as with her AARP discount and military discount