When 4-year-old Elizabeth Marcotte complained to her mother in January of worms in her new bunk bed, Joyce Marcotte didn’t believe it. She even scolded the girl after noticing pencil-sized holes in the bunk mattress above where Elizabeth slept.
A month later Joyce was in the bottom bunk reading to her daughter when several white worms dropped from the mattress above onto the book she was holding. She flushed the larvae down the toilet, but there were more.
“I lifted up the fitted sheet and it was crawling with worms,” Joyce Marcotte said. “The most horrifying thing is thinking about them falling on my 4-year-old for months. It’s disgusting.”
At least four people have complained to the state Department of Consumer Protection about infested bedding, all of which has been traced to a Bethany manufacturer, said spokesman June Neal. Ken Welch, an entomologist with the state agricultural experiment station, has also received six calls about webbing cloth moths infesting mattresses in the past year.
Cheshire House, a Waterbury nursing home, also bought some infested mattresses, but Director Marlene Faust declined to comment on the problem.
A spokesman for the manufacturer, Olympic Bedding in Bethany, said any customer who complained received a replacement mattress.
About the same time the Marcottes uncovered the larval nightmare, another Harwinton resident began noticing golden-colored moths flying throughout her house. When Charlene Razowski searched for the source, she found a number of cocoons on the edge of a drawer in her daughter’s trundle bed.
“I pulled out the trundle and I saw about 30 moths crawling around,” Razowski said. “I turned the mattress over and I thought I was going to throw up, there were little worms and moths, a wetness and a terrible smell.”
The discovery was followed by days of manic cleaning, calls to exterminators and trips to the dry cleaners, and eventually, court action.
It turns out that the infested mattresses had been purchased at the same Torrington store, the Torrington Mattress Co., but when the women called, the store and the manufacturer said they were not responsible for the cost of the cleanup.
They were told to call the New York company that supplied the raw materials. That company also denied insurance claims for the damage caused by the insects later identified as webbing cloth moths, known for feeding on natural fibers. Officials at the Torrington Mattress Co. declined to comment.
Some of the infested bedding was recalled by the retail stores; other stores waited until customers complained and then offered to replace the bedding.
With thousands of dollars in cleaning and extermination costs, plus time lost from work and the expense of replacing curtains, bedding and carpets, Marcotte and Razowski have filed suits against all three companies in Litchfield Superior Court.
Torrington Mattress Co., where the Harwinton women bought their mattresses, Olympic Bedding, the Bethany company that built the mattresses, and Blocksom & Co. from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., which sold some of the raw materials to Olympic Bedding all agree why the mattresses became infested. But they all point to each other when assigning blame.
In mid-1995 Olympic Bedding purchased from Blocksom a small amount of insulating material that has natural fibers, including camel hair and cashmere. These materials are not commonly used in retail manufacturing, said Blocksom President Alan Sellery, but the company had them left over from a commercial account.
“These pads were in their warehouse for a long time, and they sold them to us cheap,” said Olympic’s Jackie Holland, noting that the small manufacturer had to do what it could to keep up with giant companies such as Sealy or Serta. “When we got the specs, we found this pad had camel hair in it and we didn’t want to use it.”
But Olympic Bedding used the product anyway, manufacturing about 50 mattresses with the padding that it later found was infested with the cloth moth eggs, Holland said. She would not identify the other stores that sold the mattresses.
But Blocksom said it sterilized the pads before selling them and they must have been infected at the Olympic Bedding plant. Olympic says it has never had any problems with insect infestations in its bedding except for the one batch that used the natural fiber pad made by Blocksom.
About a year after the mattresses were sold, the complaints began streaming in, Holland said. Such a time line is consistent with the life cycle of this moth. In fact, the moth larvae could live in the mattresses for as long as 2 1/2 years before they begin to transform into adult moths, Welch said. The moths are not known to carry diseases but can cause extensive damage to rugs, clothes and curtains.
Because the full life cycle of the moth can be as long as four years, the houses that were infested will have to be periodically treated for years to come, exterminators told the families.
Mark Baronas, an attorney for both Harwinton families, said all three companies are liable.
“Under the law, everybody who was involved in selling, or distributing or manufacturing the mattresses is responsible,” Baronas said.
Both women, with their children also named as plaintiffs, are seeking damages greater than $15,000, plus legal costs and punitive damages.
Anna Carbonaro, a lawyer with the state Department of Consumer Protection, said the department is investigating the complaints and considering filing administrative complaints against the manufacturer or the supplier for either violating statutes regulating unfair trade practices or another governing the manufacturing of bedding.
The Harwinton families say they want to be reimbursed for the time, money and trauma that the insect infestation has caused them.
Elizabeth, 4, still has not moved back into her Pocahontas-themed bedroom.
“I put her into her room and she just flipped,” Joyce Marcotte said. “She’s afraid of the worms, she just thinks they’re everywhere.”
