When she opened the letter from her dead son’s former landlord this week, Danelle Eckert thought there had to be some mistake.

The letter, addressed to Eckert and to the estate of her son, Colin Byars, was demanding March and April rent, late fees and an “early termination fee” because he had left his apartment before the end of his lease. Byars, a 24-year-old teacher, was killed Feb. 21 when he was punched in the head on a Kenosha street.

“I thought they must not understand that Colin was killed. But no, they understood completely,” Eckert said.

She said the apartment’s property manager told her that they knew Byars had been killed. But the woman told Eckert the management company had been advised by their legal representative that they should go after the rent and fees.

“I said you might be able to do this, but should you do this?” Eckert said. The early termination fee makes her especially angry. “How was my son supposed to know he was going to be killed?” she asked.

Byars was a popular young special education teacher and coach at McKinley Middle School. He was in his first year as a full-time teacher after graduating from college. He died when, according to witnesses, he got into a dispute outside a tavern and was struck in the head. The man who hit him, Martin Walker, has been charged with murder.

Eckert said her son had lived since last August in Cambridge Apartments, in the 600 block of 15th Place. He was the leaseholder but shared the apartment with a roommate.

After Byars’ death, the roommate notified the apartment’s management of the death and told them he would be moving out. The roommate was not on the lease, according to Eckert.

Friends and family cleaned out the apartment in March, Eckert said.

CCRT Properties in Brookfield, which operates the apartment building, did not answer calls for comment. A person who answered the management office phone at the Kenosha apartment building would not comment.

According to the Wisconsin Department of Consumer Protection, the estate of a person who has died could be liable for unpaid rent, but not the person’s family.

Eckert said Byars, who was only months into his career when he was killed, had no estate beyond his final paycheck.

Kenosha attorney Ronald Diersen, who often handles landlord-tenant issues, said it is not legal for landlords to go after family members. He said that sometimes after a tenant dies no one in the family will take the person’s belongings from the apartment, and a landlord must go through formal eviction proceedings to regain access to the apartment. “It sounds like the family made it easy for the landlord,” by cleaning out the apartment, he said.

“If there is no estate they aren’t going to get any money,” Diersen said. “They can’t go after the parents, the parents have no obligation at all.”

When the story went public on Friday, it quickly gathered steam. By evening, CCRT Properties had been named “Worst Person in the World” in the Countdown by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

Eckert said she was not upset about the money.

“It’s the morals of the whole thing,” she said. “I just wanted the community to know how ruthless and heartless these people were.”