By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2026-10-08 19:21:57 | Updated at 2026-10-08 21:13:49
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Years before authorities say he gunned down his wife and daughter inside their New Jersey mansion, David Grodnick went to court claiming a real estate agent stashed his family’s $33,800 deposit in her own bank account after luring them into a hazardous rental.
The insurance executive and his wife, Lora, said they chose the Princeton area because of “the benefits of its school system for their daughter, who has special needs,” according to a lawsuit they filed in 2018 and obtained by The Post. The complaint does not give her name or age.
The house they rented had arsenic in the well, electricity that “continuously shorted out” and a living room fireplace that “emitted carbon monoxide fumes,” the couple alleged.
Specifically, the Grodnicks sued real estate franchise giant Keller Williams, franchisee Adele DeMoro LLC and agent Hong Jing in Mercer County Superior Court under the state Consumer Fraud Act, seeking triple damages. The landlord, Xiaoying Wang, was not named.
The dispute dates to 2016, when the family settled on 28 Morris Drive, a 4,257-square-foot house with four bedrooms on just over half an acre.
According to the complaint, Jing held herself out as the property manager and said a certificate of occupancy and a fire inspection had been applied for, smoke detectors and extinguishers had been bought and well testing was underway. The suit claims those assurances proved false.
The couple signed a lease on June 3, 2016 and gave Jing two checks made out to the landlord. One was a $26,000 “initial deposit” equal to five months of rent. The other was $7,800 in security. New Jersey caps deposits at a month and a half of rent, the filing says.
The money belonged in a brokerage trust account, the Grodnicks alleged. They claimed Jing instead deposited it in her personal checking account, “comingling the funds with her personal money.”
The well was tested on June 30, 2016 after the couple demanded it.
“Astonishingly, the results revealed that the well water contained high levels of arsenic,” the complaint states, adding that the readings exceeded the state limit.
The family said the contamination blocked the home’s treatment system and kitchen faucet, and that they paid to fix the well pump and tank, water heater, furnace, refrigerator and plumbing.
When they raised the electrical and fireplace problems, they were told the issues were “petty,” according to the suit. They cited what they called Jing’s “elusiveness” and said they were “forced to immediately pay out of pocket.”
Jing, Adele DeMoro and Keller Williams answered jointly in February 2019. They denied that Jing presented herself as the property manager or that her unavailability forced the couple to pay for repairs. They acknowledged she had no management agreement with the landlord.
They said Jing was a licensed salesperson working as an independent contractor for Adele DeMoro, which runs a Keller Williams office in West Monmouth. Keller Williams said its local offices are “independently owned and operated” and denied “any agency relationship” with its franchisees.
On most other allegations, including the reason for the move, the arsenic results and the handling of the deposit, the defendants said they lacked enough information to admit or deny them.
Their 30 listed defenses included that the suit came too late, that any losses stemmed from the couple’s own negligence or a third party’s, and that the Grodnicks had “unclean hands” and “suffered no damages.”
A one-page stipulation filed Sept. 4, 2019 dismissed the case for good “without costs to either party.” It does not say whether money changed hands and contains no admission of wrongdoing.
The Morris Drive house sold for $837,000 in January 2021. That August, the Grodnicks closed on a nearly 6,000-square-foot home in Montgomery Township on Wild Azalea Ln for $1.345 million listing records show.
Nearly eight years after the couple sued, police entered that house on Oct. 2, a day after a welfare check went unanswered. They found Lora, 62, and the couple’s 24-year-old daughter, Sloane, in separate bedrooms with gunshot wounds to the head. David, 61, was also dead inside with a firearm in his possession, prosecutors said.
The medical examiner ruled the women’s deaths homicides and his a suicide. No motive has been given, and prosecutors have called it an isolated incident with no danger to the public.
David was a senior vice president and underwriting counsel at Land Services USA, a Philadelphia-based insurance agency that works on commercial real estate deals. Sloane, a 2020 graduate of the Hun School of Princeton, earned a degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2024 and was pursuing a master’s at the Rhode Island School of Design.
The Montgomery Township home is not on the market. Real estate sites estimate its value at about $2 million
