Hank is more than a house pet to medically retired U.S. Army Sgt. Derek Kolb of Houston.
The greyhound/black cur mix is Kolb’s service dog—a confidant who both alerts him to unexpected encounters and wakes him from nightmares related to the PTSD he suffered during his 2005-06 deployment to Iraq, where he cleared road side bombs as an infantryman.
Hank is also the reason Kolb was denied housing—a violation of the Fair Housing Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, which Kolb alleged in a complaint he filed late last year in a Houston U.S. district court.
The complaint alleged that a defendant leasing company denied renting Kolb a house after disclosing he would be living with his service dog. Kolb had sent the defendant a photograph of Hank, according to the complaint.
“They told him his dog was aggressive and they wouldn’t rent to him,” said Tyler VanHoutan, a patent attorney and partner in Winston & Strawn who handled Kolb’s case pro bono.
“They knew he was a veteran who required a service animal,” VanHoutan said of his client’s allegations in Kolb v. Willshow. “I don’t think a lot of people in the real estate market realize that they have to be accommodated.”
That case recently settled confidentially, VanHoutan said. And one of the conditions of that settlement was that the defendant completed a series of training sessions in which its rental agents are trained on fair housing law and why disabled veterans sometimes need the help of service dogs such as Hank, he said.
“He’s got anxiety issues,” VanHoutan said of Kolb, who suffered traumatic brain injury from a bomb explosion in Iraq. “And so the dog is a calming influence. He lets him know if people are coming up behind him. And it can even sense if he’s getting a migraine so he can go get his medication.”
Kolb and Hank later found substitute housing that was more expensive and farther away from where Kolb is attending school, VanHoutan said.
Mike Jacobellis, a partner in Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith who represents the defendant in the case, said his client denied the allegations in the complaint, noting, among other things, that Kolb did not inform the defendant he had PTSD. Still, his client agreed to settle, Jacobellis said.
“I mean, we agreed to have continuing education on the disability act. Nobody wants to go to trial against a disabled veteran,” Jacobellis said. “That’s the short and long of it.”
Jacobellis said that part of his client’s job as a rental property leasing company is making sure insurance policies on rent property are not canceled. Insurance companies will cancel the policy on a landlord’s property if they discover an “aggressive dog” on the property, he said.
“He did tell somebody it was a service dog,” Jacobellis said of Kolb. “He didn’t say he had PTSD, but he did say he had a service dog, and they were trying to get him in a house with a service dog.”