Latest news with #ResidenceInn
Daily Mail
04-08-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Tourist's life-changing injuries after swimming in filthy hotel pool and contracting horrific infection
A woman endured a horrific infection and agonizing injuries after she swam in a hotel's indoor pool that her lawyers say wasn't treated with chlorine. Alexis Williams, 23, was staying at the Residence Inn Downtown Ann Arbor Hotel in Michigan in June while visiting her grandmother, who was having a procedure at a nearby medical center. She decided to take a swim in the hotel's pool with her cousins, who soon became violently ill and started vomiting. Williams scraped her knee while she was swimming and contracted a rare infection called MRSA, or Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. MRSA is caused by staph bacteria and is resistant to most antibiotics, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Within hours of swimming in the pool, Williams was overcome with severe pain and couldn't even walk, she recalled to local news. 'It was outrageous,' she told local Fox affiliate, Fox 2 Detroit. 'The pain was excruciating. I had to get poked a lot with a whole bunch of needles, and being prescribed medications I never thought I'd be prescribed to.' Williams told local news that doctors said they may have to amputate her leg if they can't get the infection under control Williams had three surgeries on her leg and remains on strong IV antibiotics, according to her lawyer, Ven Johnson. She now has to constantly receive medication through intravenous therapy and needs a walker. Williams even feared that her leg would have to be amputated. 'I've gone through a lot of pain and suffering, and still currently am,' she told the Detroit Free Press. 'I'm very frightened, very nervous and just appalled by everything.' Williams' lawyers obtained records from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy that revealed the heinous conditions of the hotel's pool. Her lawyers said inspections of the swimming pool on June 12, June 27, and July 8 showed no chlorine or bromine in the water. The civil complaint argues that 'the hotel knew that its swimming pool had a Standard Plate Count that exceeded 200 CFU/ml, which indicates a dangerous level of bacteria present in the swimming pool and poor disinfection.' Williams' lawyers believe that the hotel knew the pool didn't have these chemicals and had improper pH levels. Her legal team accused the hotel of disregarding public safety and creating an unsafe environment for guests. 'Alexis started developing this infection within several hours of coming into contact with this water,' Michael Freifeld, an attorney with Williams' legal team, told the Detroit Free Press. Williams' legal team alleges that the hotel's pool didn't have chlorine or bromine in the water, creating an unsafe situation for guests 'We have no doubt, given the records we have and the experts that we are going to hire, that the infection Alexis experienced, and is experiencing, was clearly connected to the pool.' Johnson added that Williams still has a long way ahead of her, and doctors said they may have to amputate if the infection isn't under control. 'For anybody, let alone a 23-year-old young person, it's a very scary, uncertain prognosis,' Johnson said. The lawsuit is seeking $25,000 in damages. Daily Mail reached out to First Martin Corporation, which owns the Residence Inn for comment on the accusations.
Business Wire
30-07-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Excel Group Acquires Hampton Inn & Suites Coconut Creek and Residence Inn Fort Lauderdale Coconut Creek Hotels
ARLINGTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Excel Group ('Excel'), an Arlington, Virginia-based private equity firm that owns, develops, and invests in hotels throughout the United States, today announced that it has acquired the Hampton Inn & Suites Coconut Creek ('Hampton Inn') and Residence Inn Fort Lauderdale Coconut Creek ('Residence Inn') hotels in Broward County, Florida. The acquisitions of these properties are Excel's first in South Florida in several years and are investments of Excel Fund I. Opened in 2014 and 2019, respectively, the Hampton Inn and Residence Inn both feature 105 guest rooms and over 1,000 square feet of meeting spaces, as well as outdoor pools, fitness centers, and communal amenity areas. Both hotels are strategically located in the vicinity of key demand drivers in Coconut Creek, including two major medical centers, significant corporate and industrial space, leading sports facilities, and other leisure assets, including the Seminole Casino with a 3,000-seat concert and entertainment venue. The Hampton Inn just completed a comprehensive renovation that incorporated all new guestroom and public area furnishings and design. 'We are excited to acquire the Hampton Inn and Residence Inn hotels in Coconut Creek, both of which are high-quality assets within top-performing select-service brands,' said Shoham Amin, Founder and Principal of Excel Group. 'These two transactions reflect the attractive opportunity to acquire hospitality assets in the South Florida market, with its robust tourism, business and healthcare sectors.' About Excel Group Founded in 2011, Excel Group is an Arlington, VA-based private equity firm that owns, develops, invests in and asset manages hotels in markets across the U.S. Excel Group is focused on disciplined, cycle-appropriate hotel real estate investments and asset management. For more information, please visit
CBS News
29-07-2025
- Health
- CBS News
Woman files lawsuit, claims she almost lost a leg due to unsanitary pool at Ann Arbor hotel
A 23-year-old woman says she almost lost her leg due to an infection in a hotel pool in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Alexis Williams is suing the Residence Inn and its owner for allegedly not keeping their pool in clean condition. Williams claims a scrape on her leg exposed her to bacteria when she was swimming in the pool on June 24 with her two younger cousins, who also got sick. Williams says she's already undergone three surgeries for her leg. She says doctors diagnosed her with MRSA, an infection from an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, that's led to pain, mobility issues, and lack of sleep. She says she still uses a walker, more than a month after getting in the water. Hotel officials told CBS News Detroit that they are just now hearing about the lawsuit and do not have a comment at this time. "All I could think about was not only myself, but my family was in there before me, longer than me. And I ended up coming out with something worse," Williams said. Her attorneys claim tests showed there were high PH levels and dangerous levels of bacteria before and after Williams swam in the hotel pool. "The Residence Inn indicated on several occasions that there was no chlorine in the pool," said attorney Michael Freifeld. "It should have been shut down several times during the course of the month of June, no question about it. But there's no question this pool was unsanitary for a good portion of the month of June." Attorneys say they're seeking at least $25,000 to cover her current and future medical costs as well as physical and emotional damages. "It makes me really feel depressed. It makes me feel like I can't depend on myself anymore. I have to depend on others. All I can think about is trying to heal, but it feels like I'm not physically, mentally, or emotionally," she says.
Los Angeles Times
29-06-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
The California story we keep erasing
A few months ago, while visiting the rooftop bar at a Residence Inn in Berkeley, I picked up the city's glossy 'official visitors' guide' and searched it for the historical nuggets that these kinds of publications invariably include. 'For thousands of years before the local arrival of Europeans,' I read, 'Berkeley, and the entire East Bay, was the home of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone. The specific area of present-day Berkeley was known as Huchiun.' Not too bad for a public-relations freebie, except it then skipped a few millennia in a speed rush to the appearance of the Spanish in the late 1700s, the discovery of gold (1848), the founding of the University of California in Berkeley (1873) and the free speech movement and Summer of Love in the 1960s, which, according to the guide, endowed the city with 'a bias for original thinking' and an 'off-beat college town vibe.' I've spent most of the last five years digging into California's past to expose UC's role on the wrong side of history, in particular Native American history. Beginning in the early 20th century, scholars at Berkeley (and at USC and the Huntington Library) played a central role in shaping the state's public, cultural identity. They wrote textbooks and popular histories, consulted with journalists and amateur historians, and generated a semiofficial narrative that depicted Indigenous peoples as frozen in time and irresponsible stewards of the land. Their version of California's story reimagined land grabs and massacres as progress and popularized the fiction that Native people quietly vanished into the premodern past. Today, prodded by new research and persistent Indigenous organizing, tribal groups and a later generation of historians have worked to set the record straight. For thousands of years, California tribes and the land they lived on thrived, the result of creative adaptation to changing circumstances. When Spanish and American colonizers conquered the West, tribal groups resisted. In fact, the state was one of the country's bloodiest regions in the 19th century, deserving of a vocabulary that we usually associate with other countries and other times: pogroms, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, genocide. Despite this devastation, California's population today includes more than 100 tribes and rancherias. Very few details from authentic pre-California history filter into our public spaces, our cultural common knowledge. I've become a collector of the retrospective fantasies we consume instead — those few sentences in the Berkeley visitors' guide, Google, whitewashed facts on menus, snippets on maps and in park brochures, what's engraved on a million wall plaques and enshrined on roadside markers. These are the places where most people encounter historical narratives, and where history acquires the patina of veracity. One Sunday, while waiting for an order of the ethereal lemon-ricotta pancakes at the Oceanside Diner on Fourth Street in Berkeley, I read a bit of history on the menu. The neighborhood, it said, was created in the early 1850s when workers and farmers developed a commercial hub — a grist mill, soap factory, blacksmith and an inn. There was no mention that the restaurant occupied an Ohlone site that flourished for 2,000 to 3,000 years, part of a network of interrelated communities that stretched from the San Francisco Bay, crossing what is now the Berkeley campus, and following a canyon and a fresh-flowing stream into the hills. A friend who knows I like rye whiskey recently gave me a bottle of Redwood Empire. The wordy label explains that the whiskey is named after 'a sparsely populated area' in Northern California characterized by an 'often inaccessible coastline drenched in fog, rocky cliffs, and steep mountains' and 'home to majestic coastal redwoods.' It's a place 'where you can connect with Nature' but apparently not with the tribes who make it their home now and have done since time immemorial. Traditional travel guides skip the most troubling information and emphasize California as an exemplar of diversity and prosperity. The bad old days are blamed on Franciscan missionaries who, according to the 1997 Eyewitness Travel Guide for the state, 'used natives as cheap labor' and on 'European colonists who committed a more serious crime by spreading diseases that would reduce the native population to about 16,000 by 1900.' This shaky history leapfrogs the crimes of Americans and lands in the mid-20th century when Native Americans, they may be surprised to learn, 'opted for integration throughout the state.' Guides have become more hip, though they're still mostly ahistorical. The Wildsam 'Field Guide to California,' for example, includes 'There There,' by Tommy Orange (Oakland-born, Arapaho and Cheyenne) on its list of must-read fiction, provides a detailed LGBTQ+ chronology, covers Chez Panisse and the Black Panther Party but also reduces Indigenous history to the '1400s [when] diverse native tribes flourish.' UC Berkeley's botanical garden, with 'one of the largest collections of California native plants in the world,' is located in Strawberry Canyon, the route followed by generations of Ohlone to hunting grounds in the hills. No plaques in the 34-acre park acknowledge the site's pre-California past and no books in the gift store educate visitors about what contemporary environmentalists are learning from Indigenous land management practices, such as prescribed burns and selective harvesting. The gaps created by the tendency to present California's origins sunny-side-up dampen curiosity and contaminate a basic understanding of American history. For example, the Lawrence Hall of Science, a teaching lab for Berkeley students and a public science center, has initiated a project to 'promote a clear understanding of the lived experiences of the Ohlone people.' Unfortunately, it dodges the university's role in systematically plundering Indigenous graves in California and appropriating ancestral burial grounds in Los Alamos, N.M., where UC Berkeley had a role in the creation of the atomic bomb. Similarly, just about everybody on campus knows the story of the free speech demonstrations, but almost nobody knows about the longest, continuous protest movement in the state, and one still being vigorously waged against the university: the struggle to repatriate ancestral remains and cultural objects that began in the 1900s when the Yokayo Rancheria, according to local media accounts, successfully hired lawyers to stop 'grave-robbing operations by [Cal] scientists in the vicinity of Ukiah.' Even activists in the Bay Area are not immune to this amnesia. In April, I participated in a rally on the Berkeley campus to protest the Trump administration's devastating attacks on academia. The main speakers, who represented a variety of departments — ethnic studies, African American studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies and the humanities — defended the importance of anti-racism education and testified to the long history of student protests on the Berkeley campus. What was missing was not only the inclusion of a Native American speaker but also any reference to the ransacking of Indigenous sites that was inseparable from the university's material and cultural foundations. I'm reminded of Yurok Tribal Court Chief Judge Abby Abinanti's admonition: 'The hardest mistakes to correct are those that are ingrained.' Out of history, out of mind. Tony Platt is a scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for the Study of Law and Society. He is the author of 'Grave Matters: The Controversy over Excavating California's Buried Indigenous Past' and most recently, 'The Scandal of Cal.'
Yahoo
23-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Peachtree Group Celebrates Topping Out of Residence Inn by Marriott in San Antonio, Texas
ATLANTA & SAN ANTONIO, June 23, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Peachtree Group ("Peachtree") marked a major milestone in the construction of the 10-story, 171-room Residence Inn by Marriott in downtown San Antonio with a topping out ceremony, celebrating the completion of the building's structural phase Scheduled to open in the summer 2026, Residence Inn is being co-developed with Austin-based Merritt Development Group. The upscale extended-stay hotel will be owned by Peachtree and managed by its hospitality management division. "Reaching the topping out stage is a meaningful moment for any development," said Greg Friedman, managing principal and CEO of Peachtree. "This Residence Inn reflects our commitment to delivering high-quality, purpose-built hotels in markets where we see strong, long-term demand. San Antonio's blend of tourism, education and business activity makes it an ideal location for extended-stay lodging." Designed to meet the evolving needs of today's travelers, the Residence Inn will feature spacious studio suites with fully equipped kitchens, separate living and working areas and a curated collection of lifestyle amenities. Highlights include an on-site fitness center, flexible meeting rooms, inviting outdoor social spaces and a Starbucks accessible to guests and the surrounding community. The Residence Inn will offer guests direct access to San Antonio's top demand drivers, including the Riverwalk, the University of Texas at San Antonio's growing downtown campus and nearby corporate and government offices. The property is being developed within a Qualified Opportunity Zone (QOZ), reinforcing Peachtree's ongoing strategy to invest in underserved areas poised for growth. The firm is among the nation's most active hotel developers in QOZs, with nine hotels opened and another five, including this Residence Inn, currently under construction. "This project combines strong market fundamentals with meaningful community impact. We're proud to deliver an upscale extended-stay hotel to a fast-growing urban market while advancing our commitment to long-term economic growth in underserved areas," Friedman said. About Peachtree Group Peachtree Group is a vertically integrated investment management firm specializing in identifying and capitalizing on opportunities in dislocated markets, anchored by commercial real estate. Today, the company manages billions in capital across acquisitions, development and lending, augmented by services designed to protect, support and grow its investments. For more information, visit View source version on Contacts Charles Talbert678-823-7683ctalbert@
