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A Chicago tenant said he woke up in the middle of the night to rats chewing on his face after months of fighting the gnarly infestation.
Heriverto Hernandez claimed to Fox32 that the whiskered pests made a feast out of him while he slept inside his garden-level apartment in the Rogers Park complex three weeks ago.
Hernandez said he conked out after a long day at work when he felt something scurrying on his face around 3 a.m.
“I was sleeping at night. I work in the city, and I was really tired. I went to sleep, and [the rats] attacked me around 3 a.m. I felt them on my face and threw them off of my face,” Hernandez told the outlet in a translated interview.
Photos showed the man’s swollen eye and face with red cuts all over his forehead.
Hernandez sought medical care after the rat attack and was treated with a rabies shot and antibiotics. His eye, however, remains irritated from the attack, the outlet reported.
Hernandez — one of dozens of tenants in Fuerzas Activas de la Damen, a tenant union affiliated with the All-Chicago Tenant Alliance — has been complaining about the nasty rodent problem in his apartment for months.
The union has claimed that rats and cockroaches plague multiple units and that maintenance concerns haven’t been resolved by building management.
The management company for Rogers Park Apartments told the outlet that it has invested over $1.5 million into improving the apartment complex since March 2025 and has rehabilitated more than 20 units.
The company also claimed that Hernandez is involved in ongoing eviction proceedings for failing to pay his rent for eight months, and that they have made multiple offers to relocate him to a newly renovated apartment, to no avail.
“Our objective has been to improve the building, address longstanding issues, and provide safe, quality housing for our residents,” ARK Management said in a statement obtained by the outlet.
“The greatest challenge we have faced in accomplishing that goal has been our inability to communicate and work directly with certain tenants,” the company said in a statement.
“We believe this has created unnecessary delays, misunderstandings, and obstacles to resolving maintenance issues promptly.”
The management also said they take any “allegation regarding tenant health and safety extremely seriously.”
Jake Marshall-Braun, an attorney who represents tenants in ongoing litigation, told the outlet that the landlord is responsible for maintaining safe living conditions regardless of legal proceedings.
“A landlord’s responsibility to maintain their building does not end when a tenant is behind on rent or is in eviction proceedings,” Marshall-Braun told the outlet in a statement.
The terrifying incident comes as a study published this month found that house mice are genetically evolving to build immunity to household pesticides, while rats are simply figuring out how to escape deadly traps.
The findings indicate that mice and rats are adapting to the decades-long war with humans, and that big cities may need to reconsider methods for keeping the disease-carrying critters at bay.
Continuing use of rodenticide could, in the long run, be more harmful to other city wildlife that are not being targeted by the poison, scientists warned.
An attorney representing the apartment complex’s landlords did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
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