Mimi Ash is fighting back. The Truckee homeowner who arrived to her Tahoe Donner home for a ski weekend in 2009 and found the locks changed and everything from family photos to her late husband’s ashes gone, is suing the Bank of America, which she says illegally foreclosed on her home and then broke in and emptied out the place, according to a New York Times article published Dec. 21.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in October, underscores the legal minefield that banks engaging in millions of foreclosures across the country are entering. The first sign of trouble surfaced in the fall, when the paperwork practices of large financial institutions were called into question, and homeowners found that foreclosures were being rubberstamped with little or no review.
Now, some homeowners across the country are coming home to find their possessions have been taken and their locks changed by banks that issued the mortgages on their homes, according to the Times article.
Ash, who was behind on her payments, according to the article, was attempting to work out a loan modification on the property. Her husband, a Truckee real estate developer, was killed in a road rage stabbing in Tahoe City in 2005 by Timothy Brooks.
But some homeowners who are up to date on their loans or have paid off their loans have been subject to the same treatment, the Times found.
The Bank of America changed the locks and cut the electricity to a Galveston, Texas man’s vacation home, which was fully paid off, causing damage to the home as food in the refrigerator and freezer melted and rotted. The man settled the lawsuit with Bank of America for an undisclosed amount, the Times reported.
While banks insist that cases like Ash’s and the Galveston vacation home are rare, the lawsuits between banks and homeowners illustrates the difficulties that financial institutions are having as they cope with a wave of millions of foreclosures across the nation caused by the collapse of the nation’s real estate market.
