Victims’ Lifelong Possessions Destroyed in Highlands County, Florida When Property Erroneously Placed in Foreclosure by Bank
Imagine being on vacation with your family and receiving a phone call from one of your neighbors telling you that a sign had been posted on your home and that your home was in foreclosure. What an upset!
Our clients in this case believed that their properties (including two extra lots) were paid in full and were free and clear of any mortgages. And in fact, they were.
For some reason, the bank that had held the mortgages for all three properties made an error and retained a law firm to file a foreclosure complaint against our clients on one of the vacant lots that they owned which was adjacent to the lot with their homestead. The only improvement on this adjacent lot was a storage shed.
After the County Clerk issued a Certificate of Title to the bank, another law firm was hired to proceed with an eviction on this adjacent lot. Unfortunately, due to errors in the legal documents, when the County Sheriff executed the Writ of Possession, they erroneously executed it on the clients’ homestead instead of the vacant lot. When the victims telephoned the Sheriff’s Office they were told that nothing could be done to stop this eviction.
The locks on the victims’ home were changed and the door to their residence was padlocked. All of their personal possessions, furnishings and property were removed from their home by strangers and placed on the lawn of their residence for all their neighbors to see. In fact, the neighbors were told that they could take whatever they wanted, and some did. Some took things to safekeep them for the victims and returned them later. Some of the items were never returned. One of the items found in the street was the victims’ marriage certificate. All of this resulted in damage to furnishings, destruction and/or theft of property and loss of irreplaceable documents and personal possessions collected during the victims’ lifetime.
The victims had to retain an attorney just to be able to get back into their home, and they still were not able to return to their home for approximately three months. When they did, they found items still outside in the yard, holes in the walls of their home where, rather than carefully removing items, they had been torn off the wall. There were scratches and gouges on many of the walls from the furniture being removed. Many of their possessions, along with the food items in the kitchen, were tossed into sheets or tablecloths, or put in garbage bags and dragged out of the home. Some of their possessions had been placed in a storage area and had gotten wet and ruined.
Of course, this was very stressful to the victims in this case, and they endured many medical problems as a result of these events. They sought the help of Attorney Richard D. Schuler to assist them with filing a suit against the bank and both law firms that were involved in the erroneous foreclosure on their property and home with the hopes of getting their lives back to normal.
Mr. Schuler proceeded against the bank and the two law firms as follows:
1. Florida Deceptive and Unfair Business Practices Act count against the bank;
2. Invasion of Privacy count against all of the defendants;
3. Conversion count against all of the defendants;
4. Abuse of Process count against all of the defendants; and
5. Malicious Prosecution counts against the bank and one of the law firms.
This case had a happy ending, in that Mr. Schuler was successful in obtaining a settlement with all defendants approaching approximately one million dollars, which the clients justly deserved after the unexpected horror they had been subjected to throughout this matter.
