NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — A landlord who owns more than 50 properties on the Virginia peninsula has been sentenced to 17 years in prison, months after pleading guilty to charges of wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and race-based interference with housing and employment.
David Merryman, 59, owns dozens of rental properties across Hampton and Newport News.
In a sentencing hearing Wednesday, prosecutors requested a 14-year sentence, asking a federal judge to consider the scope of Merryman's criminal behavior dating back more than ten years. Defense attorney Andrew Sacks called a 14-year sentence "excessive," responding with a plea for a six-year sentence for his client.
The judge ultimately sentenced Merryman to 180 months for the wire fraud charge plus two years for identity theft-related charges.
"The unique facet of this investigation from a hate crimes perspective is the number of people abused by David Merryman, the degree they were abused and the cruelty they had to endure," said Ted Rose, a former special agent with the FBI Norfolk Field Office who investigated the case.
When speaking before the judge's sentencing, Merryman took the podium and said he was "truly sorry" and "very humbled" by his actions, apologizing to both tenants and Newport News city employees he's impacted in recent years.
Racial intimidation
The federal indictment case against Merryman argues he exhibited a pattern of intimidation of African American tenants, materializing in threats of physical violence and racial slurs.
Prosecutors argued Wednesday his racist rhetoric was a "tool in his scheme" to more quickly turnover tenants and collect more money.
In one instance, he threatened to turn an African American woman's children into "potting soil."
“Once they were in, they began demanding he made good on those promises [house fixes], then he would initiate this process of racist harassment and intimidation until they moved themselves out or he’d evict them," Rose added.
Unsanitary property conditions
Yugonda Sample-Jones, a current tenant who is still paying rent into a David Merryman property, told 13News Now that she went months without fixes to major problems with the house she rented from him.
"We had a leak from our top floor to bottom floor and it was electrical issue, he left it a hole in our ceiling for a few months," she says.
Some of the witness impact statements from a federal indictment in January add that tenants were subjected to rotting floors, rodent infestations and improper plumbing that led to sewage leaks inside the homes.
“One that stands out to me in particular, maybe one of the first tenants interviews inside a Merryman property, this woman had to walk their children down the street because the house she was renting did not have a functioning toilet," Rose said.
“He would lure people into his properties by promising to address the inadequacies of those properties. In many cases, they were condemned, things anybody would expect to have in a house. Appliances, furnaces, air conditioning," Rose added.
Financial scheme to defraud
According to the federal indictment, between 2019 and 2024, Merryman forged tenant signatures on pandemic rent relief applications, as well as fraudulently obtained large initial payments from tenants, like security deposits and prepaid rent. Then, after obtaining the money, he'd evict the tenants.
“A pattern is a way to establish specific intent to defraud, someone like Merryman repeatedly making false claims for rent relief benefits to Virginia Housing Department, you can prove circumstantially his intent to defraud a government agency by doing it over and over. Not a one off mistake, didn’t not see it happening. A careful, meticulous thing," says Mack Coleman, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, one of the federal prosecuting attorneys on the case.
In one instance, prosecutors say Merryman victimized a tenant who had paid him rent regularly for 6 years until she was laid off during the pandemic after being hospitalized. Merryman is accused of forging her signature to get $15,000 in rent relief from the government and then evicting her and disposing of all her belongings while she was in the hospital.