N.D.Cal.: Fire rendered apt uninhabitable and abandoned by operation of law, and, here, fact

A San Francisco apartment building was rendered uninhabitable from a fire, and occupants were locked out while clean up was going on. Defendant approached a construction worker and asked him to retrieve a gun from the motor compartment of a refrigerator, and that was reported to the police. The fire rendered the building de facto and de jure abandoned by operation of law, and the landlord could consent to the police entry. At the time, all personal belongings appeared to have been moved out of the apartment except for large pieces of furniture. United States v. Allen, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 28790 (N.D. Cal. March 5, 2012):

The first is that under California law, either party to a lease may terminate the lease if the premises are destroyed. Cal. Civ. Code § 1932(2) (“The hirer of a thing may terminate the hiring before the end of the term agreed upon: … (2) When the greater part of the thing hired, or that part which was and which the letter had at the time of the hiring reason to believe was the material inducement to the hirer to enter into the contract, perishes from any other cause than the want of ordinary care of the hirer.”); Cal. Civ. Code § 1933(4) (“The hiring of a thing terminates: … (4) By the destruction of the thing hired.”). Based on this principle of California landlord-tenant law, coupled with the representations the property manager made to the SFPD dispatcher about the apartment being vacant, see Scafani Decl. ¶ 3, it was objectively reasonable for Officer Scafani to believe that Ms. Wilson’s lease had been terminated as a result of the fire and, thus, that the property manager had the authority to consent to a search of Ms. Wilson’s apartment. This belief was an objectively reasonable mistake of fact, not law, and if the mistaken fact were true, it would have conferred authority to consent on the property manager.

The second reason it was objectively reasonable for Officer Scafani to believe the property manager had authority to consent to a search is the condition of Ms. Wilson’s apartment and the building as a whole at the time of the search. There is no definitive list of facts that may lead to a reasonable belief of abandonment, but in Sledge the Ninth Circuit found apparent authority where the tenants had given their landlord thirty days notice of their intent to vacate, had removed all personal belongings from the apartment, and the apartment was “empty of furnishings not belonging to the landlord” at the time that the landlord consented to the police search. 650 F.2d at 1076, 1082. Similarly, in determining whether eviction had actually taken place, the Ninth Circuit in Young considered whether the defendant’s personal belongings had been removed from his hotel room and placed into storage and whether his room key worked. 573 F.3d at 717.

Here, as in Sledge, it was objectively reasonable to believe that the apartment had been vacated. Most of the personal belongings inside had been removed from the apartment and placed into storage. …