By Laurel J. Sweet
A “devastated” Randolph family has brought a $500,000 federal lawsuit against Bob’s Discount


Furniture, claiming a teen sleep set they purchased from the zany retailer infested their home with bloodsucking bedbugs.

 The bedbugs bite:
    “I had to literally get rid of everything – clothes, the TV, keepsakes, my wedding gown,” a teary newlywed Yvette Downey, 39, told the Herald.
    “Right now, I’m living out of green garbage bags,” Downey said. “We were sleeping on the kitchen floor. No one wanted us to bring the bedbugs to their house.”

    Downey credited Bob’s with refunding her $698. The Connecticut-based chain store also had her home decontaminated after confirming the wood bed was “infested with bedbugs,” according to her product liability suit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston.
    But Robert “Bob” Kaufman, the company’s president and celebrity pitchman, cautioned, “We are customer-oriented, so don’t confuse reaction with responsibility.
    “My heart goes out to these people,” he said yesterday. “I’m sure it’s a terrifying, ugly situation. But to say we’re responsible for it, that’s a stretch. I’d be out of business if we delivered buggy furniture.”
    In 2004, when her then 13-year-old daughter Ashley Celester outgrew her twin mattress, Downey bought her a white maple sleigh bed, dresser, mirror and nightstand for Christmas.
    Downey turned to Bob’s Stoughton store, having been sold on the everyman appeal of Kaufman’s homespun commercials. The set was delivered from Bob’s warehouse in Taftville, Conn.
    By February 2012, Ashley was complaining she couldn’t get any rest and Downey and her then fiance, Anthony Downey, had begun scratching themselves raw.
    “I was thinking it was our clothes or the washing powder I was using,” Downey said.
    They didn’t know they were bombarded by bedbugs until the early morning hours of July 25, 2012, when Downey’s visiting 17-year-old cousin, Kita Johnson, sprang from Ashley’s bloodied bed howling in agony.
    “I could actually see the bedbugs,” Downey said. “She was covered with them. She was smacking them off her body. She was screaming, ‘Get them off me!’ ”
     The exterminator used by Bob’s, Waltham Services Pest and Termite Control, had found “eggs and fully grown bedbugs in each and every area” of the home, Downey’s suit alleges. Downey said she’d been living in her apartment for two years prior to the sleigh bed’s arrival and never had a problem with bedbugs.
    Kaufman argued bedbugs are an “environmental” dilemma.
    “We don’t have a company-wide problem,” he said.“Clearly, we’d have thousands of cases (of bedbugs) and that’s not the case.”
    Downey said she won’t stand for being squashed like a bug. “It’s humiliating, it’s embarrassing,” she said. “We just want our home back the way it was.”