apartment building inspector illinois

Tenant claims village calls computers 'debris'

The government calls it “debris.” Maurice Thomas calls it his life’s work.

“One day there was a knock on my apartment door, a (Lansing) village inspector was standing there, walked in and announced he was conducting an inspection,” Thomas said.

Initially, the inspector, Charles Johnson, said he was checking on the apartment’s smoke alarms.

“But then he saw my collection of computers and called them debris and garbage,” Thomas said. “He said I had to get rid of everything right away, including two 150-pound steel tables. I would have had a heart attack carrying those tables out.

“And all of the equipment works. He thought the cameras were garbage because they didn’t have lenses. I could have demonstrated that all the computers work.”

Thomas has a collection of 20 computers in his one-bedroom apartment, from which he operates a business called Marketex. He also has an assortment of monitors, cables, wires, camera equipment, a telescope, reel-to-reel tape recorders and a clarinet.

“I’ve been building computers since 1973 when I won second place in physics in a Chicago Public Schools science fair,” Thomas, 66, said. “I make videos and post them on the Internet.”

He said he has worked for a variety of political campaigns over the years, although he said he didn’t take any money.

“It’s pro bono. I do it because it’s the right thing to do,” Thomas said.

He claims he helped map Martin Luther King’s open housing marches in Chicago, worked for Harold Washington’s mayoral campaign and recently has been putting out videos on the Internet in support of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

“We were placed here near the borders of Illinois and Indiana for a reason,” Thomas said cryptically.

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