Bank Of America Accused Of Breaking Into Woman's Home, Taking Husband's Ashes
Arriving at her home in Truckee, Calif., Mimi Ash found it had been emptied.
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Bank of America (nyse:BAC) has seen easier days. The bank been reportedly identified as a target by WikiLeaks, it reportedly maintains a war room to defend against the leak, it's the subject of a federal racketeering lawsuit, one of many high profile lawsuits involving its foreclosure practices. Now, the bank has been accused of breaking into a woman's home and taking her possessions, including her late husband's ashes.
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In a Sign of Foreclosure Flaws, Suits Claim Break-Ins by Banks
TRUCKEE, Calif. — When Mimi Ash arrived at her mountain chalet here for a weekend ski trip, she discovered that someone had broken into the home and changed the locks.
When she finally got into the house, it was empty. All of her possessions were gone: furniture, her son’s ski medals, winter clothes and family photos. Also missing was a wooden box, its top inscribed with the words “Together Forever,” that contained the ashes of her late husband, Robert.
The culprit, Ms. Ash soon learned, was not a burglar but her bank. According to a federal lawsuit filed in October by Ms. Ash, Bank of America had wrongfully foreclosed on her house and thrown out her belongings, without alerting Ms. Ash beforehand.
In an era when millions of homes have received foreclosure notices nationwide, lawsuits detailing bank break-ins like the one at Ms. Ash’s house keep surfacing. And in the wake of the scandal involving shoddy, sometimes illegal paperwork that has buffeted the nation’s biggest banks in recent months, critics say these situations reinforce their claims that the foreclosure process is fundamentally flawed.
“Every day, smaller wrongs happen to people trying to save their homes: being charged the wrong amount of money, being wrongly denied a loan modification, being asked to hand over documents four or five times,” said Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.
Identifying the number of homeowners who were locked out illegally is difficult. But banks and their representatives insist that situations like Ms. Ash’s represent just a tiny percentage of foreclosures.
Many of the incidents that have become public appear to have been caused by confusion over whether a house is abandoned, in which case a bank may have the right to break in and make sure the property is secure.
Some of the cases appear to be mistakes involving homeowners who were up to date on their mortgage — or had paid off their home — but who still became targets of a bank.
In Texas, for example, Bank of America had the locks changed and the electricity shut off last year at Alan Schroit’s second home in Galveston, according to court papers. Mr. Schroit, who had paid off the house, had stored 75 pounds of salmon and halibut in his refrigerator and freezer, caught during a recent Alaskan fishing vacation.
“There is a stigma that we go in, kick the door in and throw grandma out head first and board up the windows,” Mr. Jaffa said. “We are doing a lot of good out there.”
But Alan M. White, a consumer law expert at Valparaiso University in Indiana, says: “Volume is not an excuse for violating someone’s rights.”
Continue reading at the New York Times...
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Video - ABC News
The reports of banks improperly entering homes have been gathering in recent months. In October, ABC News reported that banks had been using repo men to break into Florida homes. In some cases, firms hired by banks had entered homes that were not in foreclosure.
Recent stories on this subject...
Foreclosing on People Who Never Missed a Payment
Caught By Mistake In Web Of Foreclosure
Lenders Selling Foreclosed Homes Without Obtaining Title
Archive of Foreclosure stories - Just scan the headlines
Jan 7, 2011 at 6:00 PM
Reader Comments (17)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/business/22lockout.html?pagewanted=1&ref=business
both were sources...
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-10-20/bank-of-america-accused-of-racketeering-in-foreclosure-lawsuit.html
Bank of America has snapped up hundreds of abusive domain names for its senior executives and board members in what is being perceived as a defensive strategy against the future publication of damaging insider info from whistleblowing Website WikiLeaks.
http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=22124
Seemingly recession-proof Washington leads U.S. parade
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-10-best-cities-for-business-in-pictures-2010-12-20
Commentary: Wall Street wins, Main Street pays — again
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wall-street-wins-main-street-pays-again-2010-12-21?pagenumber=1
Report comes as copper prices hit record, other commodities surge
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/single-trader-holds-90-of-lme-copper-wsj-2010-12-21
They can create miss information just like a country in war time.
Hey i bet they could find and evict Bin laden !
@ JTS.....................Wellcom back. Been missin yr words. Althoe Gomps did have yr back. You guys ready for the storm......were going to get Frezzing rain out of it. It will shut everything down. If the cold could come down further we'ed get 2-4" of snow.
& I cant wait for "Winkie-Dinks" to unload on BoA...............................Hear-Say, thAre shakking in thAre boots of fear the truth is just around the corner.
Being that this is happening repeatedly, what about the RICO Act? If this ain't racketeering, what is it.
Somebody hurry up and elect these guys, we have 49 more Governorships, and don't forget the 535 or the Presidency.
She was wrongfully foreclosed upon, try reading the article. This is not the first instance of illegal bank activity, they have even foreclosed houses that were paid off.
Corporations however, are tools. Corporations are artificial magnifiers of excessive consumption. Corporations never produce any new energy, they just deplete that which has already been collected and stored by other circumstances. Corporations never sleep. And even while corporations never get hungry, almost always, they ravenously consume.
Corporations are ALWAYS parasites. Even that which is labelled as non-profit still focuses on siphoning into itself what little surplus of reserve some other assaulted fiction or beleagered organism may have squirreled away.
Because they are invented and perpetuated by the dynamic thought of an intellectual species, corporations are super-human. Ten men my incur the product of a hundred. Incorporate each of those men with his environment into a single strategic design, and that corporation can induce the consumptive consequence of a thousand men.
Corporations operate by the dictates of a charter. Corporations have no conscience. ENRON, a dominately California fantasy, was an energy corporation. On September 7, 2006, though Enron sold Prisma Energy International Inc., its last remaining business, to Ashmore Energy International Ltd. (now AEI) and has now anonymously been wholly absorbed by the greater corporate collective, the evil that it produced (except for the legal public debt incurred and forgiven by the previous Governator) lives on with every frozen homeless discovered everywhere throughout the country.
Until the American people effectively reign in the artificial beast of our nation's collective incorporated parasite, more liberty will be lost and more people will die from its unmoderated, institutional malvolence.
DanD