BLUE SPRINGS, Mo. — It was a frightful night before Halloween for one woman and her two young children, thanks to a cockroach infestation in their Blue Springs hotel room.
Tiffany Green booked a room at the Welcome Inn on Northwest Jefferson Street on Wednesday night after the group Bomb Moms KC helped her find a place to stay for the week.
Green, who is homeless and facing hard times, said she was grateful to the group for helping her and her children.
"For them to help me was really a blessing,” she said.
But what she didn't expect was to have some unwelcome company in the hotel room. She found roaches crawling on the walls, ceiling and throughout the room.
"I was walking around and I looked at this table and there was a couple roaches, and when you see one or two, there’s a few," Green said. "They were falling out of the ceiling like it was raining roaches."
To get rid of them, Green “bug-bombed” the room, which didn’t appear to help.
”You might as well say they came out ready for war because they were way worse,” she said.
The group that helped Green purchase the room said it had no idea about the conditions of the hotel.
"You offer services to help them get out of their situation and then they have to live in this, it’s disgusting,” said Tonia Gray, who helped Green. “I wouldn’t let my pit bull stay in here.”
When Green told hotel management about the problem, she did not get the answer she wanted: “We have a no refund policy,” Green said she was told.
On Thursday, Green and the Bomb Moms KC group went to the management office while 41 Action News crews were there to try to get a refund. Tempers flared when staff couldn’t find a way to reach the owner, but eventually, property mangers gave them a refund.
Still, Green and the group say the process should have been much easier.
"It’s so frustrating because you feel like you are getting the runaround,” Gray said.
Green doesn't know where she'll be staying for the next few nights — but she says it won’t be at the Welcome Inn.
41 Action News reached out to the hotel’s owner about conditions at the Welcome Inn but had not heard back by late Thursday afternoon.
