ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – A family of raccoons is contributing to the nightmare of a north St. Louis County family.

Recently, Gloria Brown has been hearing strange noises in a home she’s been renting with help from the St. Louis Housing Authority. Turns out, the noises were from a family of raccoons.

Brown, a working mother, took a picture of the momma raccoon on the roof and shared it with the You Paid For It team. Rather than running, the raccoon just sauntered back and forth and stared at Brown while she took snapshots.

Brown couldn’t get the landlord to take action, nor could she get help from the housing authority for dealing with the raccoon.

“It’s scary. It’s huge. It’s aggressive,” said Brown. “It ain’t running from us. We are running from it.”

Brown says the raccoon made a hole through her roof and fears its babies are also inhabiting the home.

“I hear them every morning. It’s too much,” said Brown.

Even her neighbor, Mike Jones, couldn’t believe this deal with the raccoon.

“I saw him go across the roof like he lives there,” said Jones. “Like he’s looking down like, ‘Ah, can I help you?’ I am thinking, ‘Okay, my neighbors got guard raccoons now.”

Brown noticed various damages to her home due to the raccoons. There were holes in a couch and chairs from suspected raccoon bites. There were tracks in almost every room.

And that’s not all. Brown’s living room camera got video of a large rat running across her floor in a one-story home.

“It’s a pretty big rat,” said Brown. “It’s big. The tail is long. It’s big.”

On top of all that the St. Louis Housing Authority stopped paying its share of the rent. A working mother, Brown had been paying $770 of $1,330 owed per month on the home. She could afford the entire $1,330 a month by herself.

So she called the You Paid For It team for help. Elliott Davis got in contact with Alana Green, the executive director for the Housing Authority, who moved fast to fix the problem.

”Although we were not paying subsidy on that current unit, once I heard from you that there was a family in crisis I wanted to do everything we could to assist her,” said Green.

Green says she called Brown personally to discuss different options for the family. Ultimately, Brown was reinstated into the Housing Authority program, which allowed her to vouch for a new place to live.

“What we did was expedite the process,” said Green. “We told her that because she was in such a crisis with that particular landlord that we would take processes that would normally take 30 days. We were able to get a lot of those done within a week.”

At long last, Brown and her children were able to move.

“I reached out to [Elliott Davis] cause I could not get help with my landlord or housing,” said Brown. “Since you got involved they expedited. I can vacate the house they paid the rent, and I got a new house.” 

“Thank you to FOX 2 and to you Mr Elliott Davis. And still, thank you to housing cause they finally reached out, and they got my issue resolved.”