NEPTUNE BEACH, Fla. – A woman said the living conditions inside her Neptune Beach home are disgusting and painful after furniture she rented came infested with bed bugs.
Ashlea Belloit and her family said they rented furniture from a local store and that is when all the problems began. Belloit said bed bugs were never a problem in her home until two weeks ago.
"Honestly, I didn't know what a bed bug was. I thought it was just something mom said when I was a child," she said. "I didn't know they feed off human blood."
She said she became painfully aware of bed bugs all after the Aaron's store in Neptune beach delivered a couch to her home two weeks ago.
"Every single time you sit on the couch, you just itch and itch. We've never had a problem before," Belloit said.
Belloit and her family showed Channel 4 pictures of bites and welts on their bodies. They also had pictures where a bed bug can be seen on the couch in question.
"It's horrible. I don't even know how to explain it. After a long day you just want to sit on your couch and you're like scratching and itching. I was taking five showers a day, I just felt dirty and couldn't figure it out, until they were falling out of my hair," Belloit said.
Aaron's has removed the couch from the Belloit home, but would not refund the cost for the rental furniture.
"We weren't getting any answers so we went back up there, we just wanted our house bombed and cleaned," Belloit said. "We don't want to live with these things, it's gross, it's nasty."
Aaron's provided Channel 4 with this statement in regard to the Belloit's situation:
"Aaron's cares about our customers – this is the value we've built our business on for more than 57 years. We provide top-quality, brand-name products and have robust operating policies that require each store to perform a Quality Assurance inspection on our merchandise before any delivery to our customer. We take concerns about the quality of our merchandise very seriously and our customers should feel confident that we make it a priority to operate our business with very high standards, including quality assurance," said Joe Fedorchak, Aaron's Divisional V.P. of Southeast Operations. "While we do not provide details regarding specific customers, we work with great effort to resolve any and every customer issue brought to our attention. Our Customer Care team works hard to offer solutions that satisfy our customers so that we can create long-standing relationships."