Widow sues Wells Fargo over wrongful foreclosure that took devastating toll

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Widow sues Wells Fargo over wrongful foreclosure that took devastating toll

Paul Harris in New York
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 23 May 2012 15.59 BST

For Oriane and Norman Rousseau, their hopes of keeping the modest California house that had been their dream home ended with a loud noise while Oriane was in the kitchen.

She rushed to the bedroom, unsure of what had happened. But when the part-time nurse smelled sulphur, she understood. Opening the door Oriane saw her husband on the bed with his head wrapped in a blanket. "I saw blood on the wall. I lifted up the comforter a little and then I lost it," Oriane told the Guardian in an interview.

Norman's suicide on May 13 was the worst possible end for the Rousseau's nightmarish experience of America's foreclosure crisis. But it was a long, surreal and twisted journey to get there. It began in May 2009, when Wachovia, now part of Wells Fargo, told the Rousseaus they had missed a mortgage payment on their home in Newbury Park, an hour outside Los Angeles.

Even though the Rousseaus had made the payment – and had the receipt to prove it – that kicked off a foreclosure process they were never able to escape, battling against the seemingly careless bureaucracy of a major American bank that eventually took their home.

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Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/may/23/widow-wells-fargo-wrongful-foreclosure

[freshwest]

1. I hope she gets something to salvage what's left of her life. This was death by thousand cuts...

Yes, they were only paper cuts, to be sure. But many people are terrorized by sheets of paper every day, losing their peace and health, wasting their energy and life fighting off the cuts to their present and future. This is the way that debt controls our lives and we are seldom able to slow things down enough to 'pay as we go,' for the necessities of life.

Some might think this couple was foolish, believing that they would truly get to enjoy 'home ownership.' You never own anything until it's paid for in full, and even then, it may be destroyed by market forces, nature or other humans. Those who were blessed by stable lives and missed catastrophes, will get to enjoy what they earned over decades of hard work and paying into the mortgage system. Those who cannot sustain twenty or thirty years, are gambling by taking on a mortgage and their sleep is never a full rest.

There are not enough alternatives to allow people to buy something outright to live that is not either prohibited by local municipalities, in cahoots with the lenders and builders, keeping the rat race going. Some young people are refusing to be take on mortgages and buying 'tiny houses' or making other arrangements to not fall into the debt trap. It's very hard for them to make a living in this leveraged system where many people cannot afford to live near work, and places they could afford to live have no work.

I hope that those who profited by those corrupt schemes are made to pay in full and not retire off this handsomely, as many of them are doing now, and always have.

[SpartanDem]

2. I hope she wins

what they did is simply horrible