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26H82CV00041Up to date

Frommer, Sandra v. Merritt, Erika et al

Housing Court·Metro South Housing Court·Last checked Jul 25, 2026, 8:03 PM·View on masscourts.org ↗

01— Where things stand right now

Sandra Frommer, representing herself, sued her landlord entities (UDR/Lenox Farms) and property manager Erika Merritt in Suffolk Superior Court; the case was moved to Metro South Housing Court in February 2026 over her objection. On June 25, 2026, she didn’t appear at a Zoom motion hearing (she says she was abroad and medically unavailable), the judge denied her continuance request and denied all of her pending motions for failure to prosecute, and set a pretrial conference for September 10, 2026.

On July 14, 2026 she filed a motion asking the judge to reconsider those non-appearance denials and decide her motions on the paperwork instead, plus a motion to stay everything (including the September 10 conference) until that’s resolved. Those two motions are pending.

02— The case in a nutshell

Sandra Frommer, acting as her own lawyer, filed a lawsuit in Suffolk Superior Court in November 2025 against the corporate owners/managers of her Braintree apartment building and an individual, Erika Merritt. The underlying claims aren’t spelled out in these documents, but her filings refer to “tort and statutory claims” and mention a related Housing Court case (26H82CV00012) in which a preliminary injunction was entered affecting possession of the same apartment — which strongly suggests a landlord/tenant fight over her unit sits underneath all of this.

In February 2026, the case was moved (“transferred”) from Suffolk Superior Court to the Metro South Housing Court. Frommer never agreed to that move and has been fighting it ever since.

Almost everything on this docket since February is about that one procedural question: which court should be hearing this case. Frommer wants it sent back (“retransferred”) to Superior Court, and she wants the Housing Court to rule on that before doing anything else. The merits of her actual claims have not been touched.

03— Who's involved
04— What's happening now

The fight right now is not about the apartment — it’s about the forum and about whether Frommer’s threshold motions ever get a real ruling.

Since February, Frommer has filed a stack of “threshold” papers: Paper 5 (retransfer to Superior Court plus a stay), Paper 7 (asking the court to recognize the transferred case’s procedural history and actually rule on Paper 5), and Paper 11 (asking the clerk’s docket entries to be corrected because some of her solo filings were logged as if jointly filed with the defendants).

Hearings on those motions were scheduled and pushed three times — April 9, May 7, and finally June 25 — each time because Frommer asked for a continuance. Her stated reasons: her mother’s accident and surgery abroad, and then her own medical treatment while overseas.

On June 24 she filed one more emergency continuance request, saying a Spanish physician’s certificate was coming the next morning. The judge denied the continuance on June 25, Frommer did not appear at the Zoom hearing, only defense counsel showed up, and the judge denied all of her pending motions for failure to prosecute and set a pretrial conference 60 days out.

The next day Frommer filed the Spanish medical certificate with a translation and asked to have it impounded (kept out of public view). Then on July 14 she filed her first motion for reconsideration, plus a motion to stay everything including the September 10 pretrial conference. Her core ask is clever and fairly modest: don’t grant my motions because I was sick — just vacate the denials that were based only on my absence, and decide the motions on the written papers with no hearing at all, since she expressly waives oral argument.

05— What's next

The reconsideration motion and the stay motion are both pending and unruled as of the last docket entry. Nothing in the record shows the defendants have filed opposition to either.

The pretrial conference is on the calendar for September 10, 2026 at 9:00 a.m. Frommer has already given advance notice that she says she’ll be medically unavailable through the end of September and has asked the court either to stay that event or reschedule it after September 30.

The realistic next steps are: the judge rules on reconsideration (on paper or at a hearing), and either the September 10 conference goes forward, gets continued, or gets stayed. If reconsideration is denied and Frommer again doesn’t participate, she risks harsher consequences — dismissal for failure to prosecute is the standard endgame in that direction. The retransfer question in Paper 5 still has no clear express ruling on this record.

06— Reading between the lines

Frommer is doing something that pro se litigants rarely do well: she is litigating a jurisdictional objection carefully and consistently. Every filing contains an express reservation that she isn’t consenting to the transfer, isn’t accepting the Housing Court as the proper forum, and is only using the case number to identify the papers. That’s a legitimate, textbook way to preserve an appeal on forum. Her July 14 reconsideration motion is genuinely well-constructed — it cites the right rules (54(b), 78) and the right cases (Monahan, Dewing, Berube), and it asks for a narrow remedy rather than a windfall.

But the pattern in the docket is also hard to ignore. Four hearings, four continuance requests, all from her, all citing circumstances abroad, spanning April through June — and now advance notice she can’t do September either. Whether or not each excuse is true (and the April motions about her mother’s surgery and the Spanish medical certificate are sworn and documented), the cumulative effect is that no judge has been able to hold a hearing on her motions in five months. Judge Theophilis appears to have run out of patience on June 25 and used the bluntest tool available.

There’s a real tension here. The denials were procedural, not substantive — the court never reached whether the case belongs in Superior Court. Frommer’s response is smart: she waived oral argument entirely and offered to have everything decided on the papers, which removes her attendance as an excuse for either side. If the court takes that offer, she gets a ruling she can actually appeal. If the court declines, her record starts to look like a litigant who won’t show up, which is the worst posture to be in.

The defense strategy, from what the docket shows, looks like patient minimalism. Gouveia appeared for all four defendants in February and then — at least on this docket — has filed essentially nothing. She shows up at hearings, Frommer doesn’t, and the motions die on their own. That’s not gamesmanship; it’s just letting the other side’s problems be the other side’s problems, and it’s working.

One genuine oddity worth flagging: the clerk really did docket some of Frommer’s solo filings as jointly filed by her and all four defendants (see entries 24 and 25). Her Paper 11 complaining about that is not paranoia — the docket bears her out. It was denied because she didn’t show up, not because it was wrong.

A smaller detail that raises an eyebrow about the quality of the drafting: her March 27 motion cites two cases with placeholder citations reading “chatgpt://generic-entity?number=0” — a fairly clear sign an AI tool was used and the citations were never verified. That kind of thing tends to cost a pro se litigant credibility with a judge.

A candid read, not legal advice.
07— The record, translated

Newest first — the plain-English reading leads; the court's wording follows.