It began as a pinch upon the wrist ...

It began as a pinch upon the wrist in the middle of the night.

It extreme pointed a suburban couple said, like something public of a horror movie.

During a stay at a San Francisco tavern John and Jennifer Fioti fix out the hard way that their apartment was infested with bedbugs.

"They were all through the whole extent of the bed, they were crawling forward our suitcases, on the bed nearest to us -- it was terrible," said John Fioti.

The Fiotis filed a lawsuit this week against Starwood taverns and Resorts Worldwide, which operates the Four Points by means of Sheraton San Francisco Airport, where the man and wife stayed.

They're suing for the medical bills each incurred after the August 2005 stay, and also for the emotional distress they say the incident caused.

"Bedbug infestation is a serious question hotels know about and ne to do something about," said an attorney for the Fiotis, Thomas Cronin. "If they don't take the question seriously, they're putting their visitors in harm's way."

John Fioti, a Bartlett lawyer, called it "the kind of thing you hear about, that you diocese on TV, but you not at any time think it's going to happen to you."

John Fioti said he joined his wife for a business trip to California and checked into the tavern for their final night there.

Jennifer Fioti, a corporate fact planner, awoke to a pinch forward the wrist, and they saw what they notion were beetles on the bed -- which they brushed most distant before going back to drowse John Fioti recalled.

if it were not that minutes later, John Fioti felt bites forward his neck and pulled another bug away, finding offspring on his hand, he said.

Bloodstained sheets

"We shakeed the sheets back and fix a half-dozen of them," he said. "Then we build bloodstains on the sheets, which we set out later are an indicator of a bedbug infestation."

What appeared to be ink blotches in succession the mattress, he said, inflected out to be excrement from the bedbugs.

They fl the scope he said, and hotel employee were dead to refund their money, and propose their check-out information in a volume separate from others, with other notations about bedbugs.

[i]cabaret[/i] officials did not return calls Wednesday.

Bedbugs are about the size of a se and can attach themselves to clothing. Infestations were reported at several modern York hotels earlier this year, and in 2003 a referee awarded a couple $372,000 in damages for the distress bedbugs caused them.

Cronin said inns are often reluctant to in a strict sense fumigate a hotel for bedbugs, to be ascribed to the cost of shutting it down.

"A shore with a can of Raid

isn't upright enough," he said.

spatterson@suntimes.com

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