There are now con­flict­ing re­ports over whether the Min­istry of Hous­ing em­ploy­ee ac­cused of il­le­gal­ly giv­ing At­i­ba and Natisha Sorzano keys to a Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) house in Green­vale Park, La Hor­quet­ta, has been “laid off” by the min­istry or has been sent on sus­pen­sion.

Guardian Me­dia Lim­it­ed (GML) con­tact­ed the man yes­ter­day when al­le­ga­tions that he had been fired from the min­istry sur­faced. When asked whether he was fired, how­ev­er, the man re­spond­ed, “No, I was not fired, I got laid off.”

Be­fore the Sorzanos and their two sons were dis­cov­ered liv­ing in an HDC house on Al­pha Av­enue, Green­vale, the man was em­ployed in the Peo­ple’s Is­sues Res­o­lu­tion Co­or­di­nat­ing Unit (PIR­CU) in the min­istry.

Asked about how he felt about be­ing “laid off” while the in­ves­ti­ga­tion is still of­fi­cial­ly on­go­ing, the man re­spond­ed, “I am afraid now of this thing you call a tele­phone. The prob­lem is when you go out of your way to try to help peo­ple and they could turn around and try to stab you in the back.”

Asked if he was re­fer­ring to two record­ings of con­ver­sa­tions said to be be­tween him­self and the Sorzanos that were made pub­lic ear­li­er this month, he replied, “I nev­er did them any wrong. I didn’t know they were record­ing me to do some­thing like that.”

How­ev­er, when Guardian Me­dia reached out to the Hous­ing Min­istry, a mem­ber of the min­istry’s Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions team said as far as they were aware the man is on no-pay sus­pen­sion and the in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the mat­ter is still on­go­ing.

The Sorzanos claim they were di­rect­ed to the man af­ter they vis­it­ed the HDC ask­ing about the sta­tus of their hous­ing ap­pli­ca­tion in ear­ly 2017 when they were asked to leave the house they were rent­ing. In Au­gust 2017, the Sorzanos moved in­to the house armed with doc­u­ments au­tho­ris­ing them to oc­cu­py it. With those same doc­u­ments, they were al­so able to get the util­i­ties in­stalled in their names.

But on No­vem­ber 4 while HDC of­fi­cials were in the de­vel­op­ment pro­vid­ing as­sis­tance to fam­i­lies af­fect­ed by se­vere flood­ing in the com­mu­ni­ty in Oc­to­ber, the Sorzanos were first ques­tioned about their pres­ence in the house.

The cou­ple brought out doc­u­ments to show the HDC of­fi­cials. Those doc­u­ments were lat­er de­ter­mined to be fake.

The Sorzanos were evict­ed from the house on No­vem­ber 7. Af­ter spend­ing sev­er­al nights sleep­ing in their ve­hi­cle with their be­long­ings scat­tered un­der the el­e­vat­ed house which they had oc­cu­pied, they moved in with rel­a­tives.

In a brief in­ter­view yes­ter­day, At­i­ba said al­though they were giv­en a place to stay with rel­a­tives they are still in des­per­ate need of a prop­er home.

Asked what the HDC has told him since the evic­tion, At­i­ba said, “Every­one keeps say­ing they are sor­ry and sor­ry but at the end of the day, that does noth­ing for us. We need a place to live.”