Home Sweet Homewreck Read online

  Back in 2010, when Allison and Jim were still living in her cousin’s house, still trying to run their restaurant, they knew nothing about any of this. They used their home “as a glorified storage unit,” Allison says. And both of them still went by every day to look at it.

  But in time the stress and uncertainty got to them. One night that spring, Jim showed up on a neighbour’s doorstep in tears. There were animals in his home, he said, raccoons crawling in through the damaged basement and scurrying around. “You could see it was beating him down,” Kelly Entwistle says. “He said to me, ‘I can’t protect my home, my wife, my family. What am I supposed to do?’” Jim was having other problems, too, problems not directly related to the house. He suffered from chronic pain, possibly linked to a bad car accident he’d been in years before. And he was taking pills for the pain—sometimes mixing them with alcohol. “But he had been doing that for his entire adult life,” says his friend Brad Burgess. “And he was functional. He ran a business, right? He got himself into a position where he could buy a house.” But after the house, Mr. Burgess says, “he became non-functional.”

  In March 2012, the new house at 31 Dunkirk (pictured while it’s still under construction) sold for $519,000.

  Supplied Photo

  About six months after moving out, Allison and Jim split up. “The stress of everything, it just got to be too much,” she says.

  They were never legally divorced and for a year after that, they kept working together at Gabby’s. But eventually, Allison left there too, and took a job at a restaurant down the street.

  Back at their property, after a brief delay, construction started again on 31 Dunkirk. In March 2012, the new house—with hardwood floors and a bright white interior—sold for $519,000, more than double what Mr. Wood and Ms. Irving had paid for the property in 2009.

  Allison Pantaleo says, without the support from 31 Dunkirk, their house started to shift east.

  Supplied Photo

  Two months later, the Pantaleo’s home—now supported by the new building next door—sold as well. It went for just under $358,000, or $32,000 less than what Jim and Allison had paid to buy and renovate it three years before.

  Even before that point, Jim’s finances were a mess. He had been paying the mortgage at 29 Dunkirk, paying rent for separate apartments, trying to keep the restaurant afloat and dealing with lawyers’ bills, among others, for years. For a while Jim borrowed money from his family to keep up. But eventually it became too much for him to handle. “He was just hemorrhaging money,” says Mr. Edwards.

  What he did, in the end, was sell his restaurant. In the letter to his lawyer, Jim said he had hoped to keep the house, “so that we could maybe escape with the smallest amount of dignity.” But it didn’t work. And without Gabby’s, Jim became even more untethered. “I knew losing the bar hurt him,” says Mr. Grammenopoulos. “That was his thing, man. He was good at it.”

  By the spring of 2012, Jim was living with his parents in Markham. “He was just a shell of who he used to be,” says Mr. Burgess.

  “He looked horrible. He sounded horrible. He was literally doing nothing.”

  But in the early summer that year, things were looking up. Jim was talking to Allison again. They’d even been on a couple of dates. One night in July, they went for dinner on the Danforth. They talked about the house—but for the first time in a while, they talked about other things too. Afterward, standing outside, they kissed. “It was a proper date,” Allison says. “A proper, amazing date.” A few days later, Jim sent Allison an impact statement for the lawsuit they’d filed. It was a brutal read—laying out, in raw and painful detail, what the house had done to his life. But at the time, Allison took it as a good sign, proof maybe, that Jim was coming out of his haze.

  It turned out to be the opposite. Jim wasn’t getting better. He was saying goodbye.

  Just after 8 a.m. on Aug. 1, 2012, Allison’s phone rang. It was a weird time for her to get a call; everyone knew she worked nights. The name on the display, though, was even weirder: Kelly Pantaleo, Jim’s mom. “I hadn’t talked to her in two years,” Allison says. “She was in tears.”

  Within months of their first kiss, Jim and Allison Pantaleo were living together. Not long after that they married, in a small ceremony at City Hall.

  Supplied Photo

  At about 12:30 the night before, Jim had sent his mother seven letters for her to distribute. They were, effectively, suicide notes. At that point, no one knew where Jim was. He hadn’t come home. He wasn’t answering his phone. “I just started saying, ‘We’ll find him. We’ll find him,’” Allison says.

  When she hung up the phone, she saw the “love you forever” text from Jim. It had come in at exactly 6 a.m. Allison spent that day and the next trying to track him down. She walked up and down the Danforth with photographs asking anyone she saw if they’d seen him. She even tried Jilly’s, a ratty old strip club nearby with a rooming house upstairs.

  On Aug. 2, 2012, at 3:55 a.m., Allison sent Jim a text, “I am wearing your sweater to make me think you are safe.”

  Supplied Photo

  That night, Jim used his credit card at another bar on the Danforth. So the next day, Allison continued her search.

  The whole time, along with Jim’s family, Allison kept sending him messages. “We sent him pictures of the cats saying ‘Daddy, please come home,’” she says. On August 2, at 3:55 a.m., she sent him a text, “I am wearing your sweater to make me think you are safe.”

  Later that day, she was in Markham with Jim’s parents. But she says, “I just got that useless feeling.” So she got in her car to head back to Toronto. A few minutes later, Jim’s cousin called: “Alli, please turn around,” she said. “Please come back.”

  A jogger had found Jim’s body in Riverdale Park, a long green strip that hugs either side of the Don River, in the middle of Toronto. He had a fatal bullet wound. He had left another note by his side. In his clothes, they found 10 cigarette butts and an empty pack of Dunhills. “He was a chain smoker but he hated the idea of littering,” Allison says. “So even though he was about to do what he was about to do, he still butted them out and kept the garbage.”

  Jim Pantaleo was 43 years old when he died. He was buried on Aug. 9, 2012, at the Holy Cross Cemetery, just north of Toronto.

  In life, he had problems. Lots of them. He smoked too much. He drank too much. And he hurt, physically, a lot of the time. But he got by. That’s what his friends and family say. He got by, just fine, at least until the house.

  Allison is now living in a small one-bedroom apartment a few subway stops away from the home she and Jim once owned. The lawsuit drags on.

  Alex Urosevic for National Post

  Earlier this year, Allison tried to have her legal claim altered to include Jim’s death. She failed. It’s hard, after all, to say any one thing “caused” a man to kill himself.

  But for Jim’s family and friends, at least, it’s clear the house played a role, in Jim’s death. “I think that was the trigger,” says Mr. Burgess. It started a spiral that consumed his marriage and his business and ended with him, in a park, with a pistol, on Aug. 2, 2012.

  As for Allison, she’s now living in a small one-bedroom apartment a few subway stops away from the home she and Jim once owned. The lawsuit drags on. There was a delay when Jim died. They had to change all the paperwork.

  Before this all started, before the wedding and the house and everything that came with it, she actually knew the couple that owned 31 Dunkirk. They used to come into Gabby’s every Wednesday night for dinner. A while back, she saw one of them in Starbucks with her daughter. Allison is 35 now. She doesn’t know when or if she’ll ever have kids.

  “I didn’t say anything, because what are you going to say,” she says. “But just watching her with her daughter . . . It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.”

  Not Quite Their �
��Dream Home’

  Allison and Jim Pantaleo bought what they hoped would be the house where they’d raise a family. But when their neighbours renovated the other side of their semi-detached home, Pantaleos allege that their own house started to fall apart. The case is now in court. This is the Pantaleos’ account of the damage.

  Richard Warnica/Mike Faille/National Post

  Timeline

  Sept. 7, 2009

  Allison and Jim Pantaleo buy a small semidetached home at 29 Dunkirk Rd. in Toronto.

  1. Early Oct.

  The Pantaleos say workers next door accidentally remove a large chunk of the their basement foundation wall.

  2. Mid Oct.

  The Pantaleos say cracks appear in their newly laid limestone kitchen floor and along the wall they share with the adjoining house.

  Oct. 31

  The Pantaleos move in.

  3. Mid November

  According to the Pantaleos, workers next door knock a hole “the size of a baseball” through their living room wall.

  4. Christmas

  The new French doors in the back of the home start jamming, the Pantaleos say.

  End of December

  Gas from the propane heaters used next door starts seeping into the Pantaleo’s home, they allege.

  5. End of December

  The Pantaleos say there are more problems: tile floors start cracking; stairs begin to separate from the wall; new cherrywood floors being to warp.

  6. Jan. 2, 2010

  The Pantaleos’ pipes freeze. They believe this is because of the dig next door. They have to cut a hole in their own living room wall to repair them.

  7. Jan. 15

  Workers demolish the top floor of the home next door. The Pantaleos say this leaves their own internal wall exposed and untethered, damaging their roof and the brick work in the front of their home.

  8. Jan. 18

  Workers demolish what’s left of 31 Dunkirk, leaving the Pantaleos’ home entirely exposed. In the process, the Pantaleos say, they rip a hole in the Pantaleo’s dining-room ceiling.

  9. Jan. 22

  Cracks are now visible all along the exposed wall, the Pantaleos say, and the house is now leaning toward the pit next door. On the advice of an engineer, the Pantaleos flee their home.

  10. Feb. 18

  Concerned the house will tumble over, workers install a series of massive wooden crossbeams in the Pantaleos’ house.

  Oct. 10

  A committee of adjustment ruling clears the way for building to begin again at 31 Dunkirk.

  March 31, 2012

  The new 31 Dunkirk is sold for $519,000.

  May 2012

  The Pantaleos sell 29 Dunkirk for $357,900.

  About the Author

  Richard Warnica is a reporter at the National Post. Has has also worked at Canadian Business, Maclean’s, the Edmonton Journal, the Tyee, Canwest News Service, and as a freelancer in Kosovo, Serbia, Vancouver and elsewhere.

  Copyright

  Home Sweet Homewreck © 2015 by Richard Warnica

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  EPub Edition May 2015 ISBN: 9781927402283

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  About the Publisher

  Postmedia Network Inc.

  365 Bloor Street East

  Toronto, Ontario

  Canada

  M4W 3L4

  http://www.postmedia.com

  Postmedia Network is the largest publisher by circulation of paid English-language daily newspapers in Canada, representing some of the country’s oldest and best known media brands.