Opinion
15-P-1476
04-14-2017
Emile AKPAKI v. Joshua BACON & another.
MEMORANDUM AND ORDER PURSUANT TO RULE 1:28
Defendant tenant Sophie Quintana appeals from a Housing Court judgment awarding possession of a certain premises to the plaintiff landlord, Emile Akpaki, alleging error. She argues that the judge erred in excluding certain evidence and, essentially, that the judge's decision was against the weight of the evidence. We affirm.
We first note that Quintana has not provided a record of the proceedings below, aside from a copy of the lower court docket and a copy of a default judgment against defendant tenant, Joshua Bacon. "It is the obligation of the appellant[ ] to include in the appendix those [materials], which are essential for review of the issues raised on appeal." ShawmutCommunity Bank, N.A. v. Zagami, 30 Mass. App. Ct. 371, 372-373 (1991). Our review for any claim of error is generally barred if the record before us is insufficient to enable us to confirm that an error was committed. In such cases, the appealing party's claims are deemed to have been waived. See M.M. v. D.A., 79 Mass. App. Ct. 197, 205-208 (2011).
The trial docket suggests that the trial judge issued written findings, but Quintana has not provided them to this court.
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From the limited record, it appears that the defendants leased a certain premises from the plaintiff. That lease expired on its own terms in April, 2015, but the plaintiff, at the request of the defendants, extended the lease by sixty days. The plaintiff served the defendants with a thirty-day notice to quit upon the termination of that extension. Quintana asserts that the case was brought for nonpayment of rent, but the fragments of the record we have do not bear that out. Her brief includes numerous factual assertions that are not supported by anything in the record before us; as to those few facts that are supported by documents attached to her brief, we do not know if those documents were properly admitted in the trial court.
Quintana's general claim is that this was a retaliatory eviction after Bacon contacted a lawyer relating to a slip and fall incident on the premises. She alleges that a prior notice to quit, filed thirty days prior to the initial termination of the lease, was used as a tactic to get the threat of a lawsuit dropped. However, no summary process action was ever commenced as a result of that notice. Rather, a new notice was issued two months later, at the expiration of the sixty-day extension granted by the plaintiff to the defendants, resulting in this summary process action.
Quintana's duty to provide this court with a record adequate to review her claims of error, see Chokel v. Genzyme Corp., 449 Mass. 272, 279 (2007), is not diminished because she is self-represented. See Davis v. Tabachnick, 425 Mass. 1010 (1997). On occasion, we may respond to inadequacies in the record on appeal by requesting additional record materials, including an omitted transcript. See Wooldridge v. Hickey, 45 Mass. App. Ct. 637, 639 n.2 (1998). However, a review of the plaintiff's brief describing the defendants' conduct, and the documents submitted by him (which also may or may not have been before the trial court), indicates that this is not the extraordinary type of case where we should do so.
Judgment affirmed.