It was always going to be a challenge for Manor Park’s La Coop Coffee to open a neighborhood shop in the middle of a pandemic.

On Tuesday night, it appeared that things were getting even tougher: the owners posted a video on Instagram saying they were being illegally evicted by the landlord.

The nearly five-minute video shows the coffee shop’s owners, married couple Juan Luis Salazar Cano and Stefanie Fabrico, standing in front of their business explaining that their landlord — Charles Paret of Coloma River Capital — was attempting to evict them so he could sell the building.

In the video, Paret can be seen talking to police and yelling to the owners, “Guys, this is a pop-up. It was never supposed to stay here. You knew that.”

The video ends showing onlookers congregating outside of the shop and the owners assuring the audience that they are going to be okay.

Since it was posted, it has received attention locally and brought additional awareness to the current ban on landlords evicting tenants due to a D.C. emergency order.

Official records and conversations with the involved parties explain the dispute that led to Tuesday’s Instagram video. Washington City Paper first reported on the backstory.

In July, La Coop Coffee opened on 1st Street right off of Kennedy in between the Brightwood Park and Manor Park neighborhoods. The shop’s mission is to provide ethically-sourced coffee from Guatemala that supports growers and farmers by paying them up to 40 percent more than market price.

However, almost immediately after opening, Fabrico tells DCist/WAMU, Paret was trying to find ways to get them to leave.

“He has been trying to intimidate and threaten us for a number of months now to try to get us to move out,” says Fabrico. “The landlord is in a desperate situation to potentially try to sell the building.”

Cano and Fabrico were home on election night when they got a notification at about 6:30 p.m. from shop security cameras that there were people on their business’s property. They called the police. Both D.C. police officers and Paret showed up.

“He sent workers to erect a fence around our property to try to prevent us from going in,” says Frabrico. “He is trying to invalidate our lease and he thinks that by boarding it up, it will prevent us from continuing our business operations. This is his attempt at a self-help eviction.” 

Paret contests that recounting of events. He tells DCist/WAMU he wasn’t there to evict the tenants, but rather to board up and fence the property in an effort to protect it on election night, as some other businesses were doing in the city. (Ultimately, protests that evening were largely localized and small).

Paret says he told La Coop’s owners in advance that he would be taking this action. The police report obtained by DCist/WAMU reiterates this account.

The report also states that this was not a criminal act — Paret is allowed to board up his property and La Coop can remove the boarding to open up the next day. When all was said and done, Paret did not board up or fence the property that evening and La Coop opened up for business the next day.

Paret calls it a “misunderstanding,” but Cano and Fabrico are not convinced.

The landlord tells DCist/WAMU that La Coop’s lease has expired and “they’re currently in violation of their lease.” However, he insists that he wasn’t trying to evict them and that this wasn’t an intimidation tactic.

The police report states that both landlord and tenant produced copies of signed leases but with contrasting dates.

According to sections of the lease provided to DCist/WAMU by La Coop Coffee, a pre-existing lease signed in October 2018 was replaced with one from January 15, 2020 that extends 24 months to 2022.

Paret calls this a “fraudulent lease” — he says it doesn’t have his signature, but instead one from a “third-party.” As Paret describes it, a leasing manager who is not an employee of Coloma River Capital authorized its signing. “As staff members do, they want to want to keep our tenants happy,” he says. “When it got executed, they put my name in there [using DocuSign] and I never signed it.”

He says the lease he actually signed expired on November 1, two days before he arrived on the property to build a fence. Despite repeated requests from DCist/WAMU, Paret has yet to provide this lease.

As he’s heard saying in the video, he again insists the shop was only supposed to be a “pop-up,” indicating that the coffee shop was never supposed to be permanent.

La Coop has provided the signature portion of the lease which shows a Docu-signed signature that reads “Charles Paret.” When asked to respond to the claim of a “fraudulent lease,” the owners responded with a “HaHa” emoji sticker and wrote that there were plenty of emails that Paret was copied on that discussed entering this new agreement. Additionally, La Coop’s owners said that Coloma River’s food and beverage manager told them he was discussing the lease extension with Paret.

The current moratorium on evictions in D.C. due to the pandemic makes the question of when the lease expires moot, at least for now. And, even if the city wasn’t in the middle of an emergency, it’s illegal to evict tenants by self-help, meaning landlords can’t repossess a rental property without following the legal process. This also applies to commercial tenants, even if the law does often treat them slightly differently than residential tenants. For example, a landlord couldn’t simply board up a building to keep business owners out.

“Landlords can’t conduct evictions of tenants, whether commercial or residential, without judicial process,” says Rich Bianco, a D.C. real estate and hospitality industry attorney. That means going to court, getting an appropriate judgement, and having U.S. Marshals come to the eviction. But none of that is happening now due to the moratorium.

“There should not be any evictions going on right now, whether by judicial process or by self-help,” says Bianco. “And there should never be self-help evictions.” 

The neighborhood came out on Tuesday night to support the coffee shop. Washington City Paper reports that Ward 4 Councilmember-elect Janeese Lewis George made her way to La Coop to show her support, even though polls were still open (she won her race easily).

He insists that everything will be sorted out, but also says La Coop can’t stay in that First Street building. “As beautiful as that coffee shop is and as much as I really would love to keep it there, you just can’t.”

Paret says the property put him in debt by $7.5 million which has forced him to bring in a third-party developer. “You have to build the property to support the developer… support the purchase price,” he says. “This has financially cost me, our family. This has created a big, big problem for us. Landlords are really, really hurting too.” (Paret was recently profiled in Washingtonian in a story about millennials investing in D.C. restaurants, as City Paper first noted.  In it, he describes his idea of “tiny houses of restaurants” and “micro-concepts,” like fitting a Peruvian-chicken stand inside of a 300-foot ATM.)

He says the plan is to develop affordable housing and a new grocery store at the property where La Coop currently exists. Coloma River Capital, of which Paret is managing partner, has at least four other projects under development on Kennedy Street NW.

For now, La Coop Coffee remains open and the owners maintain that their lease legally gives them right to stay until January 2022. Fabrico says that they pay the rent on time and Paret himself has called them excellent tenants.

“We’re open today because we’re going to keep focusing on what we’re here to do,” says Fabrico. “What we’re here to bring to the community.”

Ally Schweitzer contributed reporting to this story.