“I was doing it to be nice,” Ritu Vohra told Christin Ayers of KPIX5, after she rented her Sunset District home to a collection of Irish foreign exchange students. Having once been a foreign student studying in the United States, Vohra assumed that present day college kids were just as responsible, respectful, and boring as she was. (Ed note: in an email sent to SFist, Vohra says "I'm not boring." SFist regrets the error.)

Think again, Ritu!

For reasons only she knows, Ritu waited until after the students vacated her home to walk through her property. It was then that she discovered holes in the wall, chandeliers ripped from the ceiling, and used condoms lying all over the place.

Though CBS5 reported in the segment below that Vohra did not discover the damage until the students had vacated, she tells SFist that that is actually not the case. In actuality, she says:

"The tenants were due to vacate and do a handover on Friday Sept 19th but I went by on Thursday Sept 18th to respond to a DBI complaint for illegal construction (but the house isn't under construction coz students lived there) I saw the damage. The complaint was likely by some neighbor who had no explanation for all the noise coming form the house. I contacted the student who was to do the hand-off the next day and he basically he told me he's leaving for Ireland the next day and not coming back. So he basically left me with this mess and took off. There was no handing off, no walk-through, no returning of keys. I saw the mess on Thursday and came back with the press on Friday."

"This is mini-terrorism." Vohra told KPIX5. A look through the home is indeed pretty shocking. The students seems to have made no effort to clean up anything. Anything at all! Broken mirrors, bottles strewn on the floor, panties lying around; why would anyone over the age of five think this was an acceptable way to leave rented property?

Everyone knows that other than filling small nail holes with toothpaste, you have to leave a rental the way you found it.

KPIX5 got in touch with the Irish Consulate, who said they'd try and track down the little leprechauns and shake some gold out of their pockets.

Update 2:38 p.m.: Irish newspaper The Independent has found the actual students and has gotten us an explanation (the article is best read aloud in an Irish brogue). To paraphrase, most of the students on the lease had already gone back to the Emerald Isle, but the few that remained went out partying, brought back some strangers who in turn invited more strangers.

The strangers, OF COURSE, trashed the house. Being poor and having no idea what to do, the Irish students split, explaining, “We should have never let these people into the house in the first place and we are very sorry for what happened. We tried finding out who they were the next day but when we failed to do so we panicked and we didn’t know what to do.”

The students promise to pay for every penny of restoring the house to its original Sunset District glory. No word on whether or not Hollywood has yet bought the rights to this story, although rumor has it Zac Efron is currently working with an Irish speech coach.

Update 4:33 p.m.: According to an email sent to SFist by someone who says that they are property owner Ritu Vohra, SFist had "no right to call [the students] 'assholes,' when even I don't call them that and they trashed my property."

The correspondent also said that there were a number of "incorrect facts" and "fake information" in our post. As all of the information and facts in this blog post were, as we noted, a product of KPIX's and The Independent's reports on the matter, we've reached out to Vohra in hopes that she will explain what errors the broadcast station and newspaper made in their telling of the events. We have made those corrections in the body of the report, above.

[KPIX5]
[The Independent]