A 67-year-old man has been crashing in a Hunter College dorm room — among comely coeds — for nearly four decades, according to a new lawsuit by the university.
Derek DeFreitas has a permanent residence in Orange County. Yet he’s “maintained a dormitory room ‘crash pad’ at the Brookdale Residence Hall on East 25th Street and First Avenue” since 1980, a lawyer for Hunter says in the suit for his ouster.
The 14-story brick building was once a part of the Bellevue School of Nursing, but Hunter — which is associated with The City University of New York — now controls the property.
“DeFreitas refuses to leave his dormitory originally provided to him and other under a long-discontinued program dating to the 1960s that reserved a certain number of rooms for active Bellevue nurses,” the suit says.
DeFreitas has called Room 6104 a second home since he started working at Bellevue. He paid just $50 a month when he first moved in to the 100-square- foot space. Now his rent is $694.
When Hunter sent DeFreitas, who is also an attorney, an eviction notice in August he claimed to have a “contractual right to stay in his dorm room indefinitely.”
He refused “to make way for students enrolled at Hunter College who are awaiting housing, thus depriving them of much-needed space,” the suit says.
Meanwhile, male and female undergraduates “are forced to share common areas and bathroom facilities with DeFreitas,” the suit says.
And he’s also encouraged other nurses to stay put.
But one of his colleagues, 61-year-old Clayton Barone, says dorm life is lonely for a sexagenarian.
“One nurse had to leave and move to the Bronx. She was my best friend, I was really sad,” Barone said, adding that he says hello to the students but they mostly keep to themselves.
Hunter, which claims the right to terminate DeFreitas’ month-to-month occupancy agreement with just 30 days notice, has been able to clear 21 of 30 nurses from the rooms.
College officials are asking a judge to issue an order directing a city sheriff to “eject DeFreitas from the dorm room.”
But DeFreitas claims he moved out within the last few weeks and retired from his job.
“Hunter made me feel terrible when I had to leave. I wouldn’t have retired if I could have stayed,” DeFreitas said.
He said he kept the dorm room as a pied-a-terre because his commute home to upstate New York could take up to three hours.
“I looked into what it would cost to rent an apartment and it would cost me $3,500 when I only paid a few hundred,” he explained.
Hunter’s attorney, Eric D. Sherman, declined to comment.