STAR-TELEGRAM - "Evictions increasingly common" -
Constables and deputies end up playing the final, painful role in an all-too-common proces. Evictions, the worst part of the job.
One recent morning, two county deputies marched along a narrow hallway in Hunter Plaza, an 11-story downtown residency owned by the Fort Worth Housing Authority.
They stopped outside apartment 306.
Bill Caster rapped on the door. The sound filled the gloomy corridor.
"Constable!" he announced.
The reason for his presence was as unambiguous as the eviction notice taped to the front door several days earlier.
These posted warnings aren't an unfamiliar sight at public housing projects and on modest rental properties in Tarrant County. But nowadays, spurred in part by record-setting foreclosures, the bright red signs are also being plastered on the doors of $300,000 homes in suburban neighborhoods, where expensive furniture and fine china are hauled out and placed alongside the curb.
"We're doing as many moveouts on foreclosures now as we are delinquent rents," said Dalton Thrasher, chief deputy constable in the northeast part of the county.
More than 3,000 writs of possession -- as many as 15 a day in one precinct -- have been executed countywide this year.
Evicting occupants is a thankless job assigned to Thrasher, Caster and other officers in the eight constables' offices.
Caster knocked on the apartment door again.
Sometimes the occupants have moved out. Others refuse to come to the door. It's as if the law officers and those accompanying them were Halloween trick-or-treaters who, if ignored, will eventually turn and walk away.
But Caster wasn't leaving. He had a sworn duty to perform.
The Precinct 1 deputy constable was about to instruct a property manager to produce the key when he heard a faint click.
The door, loosened at its top hinge, slowly swung open.
Caster looked into the pale, wide-eyed face of a 51-year-old woman.
Solemn, but not rare
The solemn event plays out in every precinct, five days a week, weather permitting, and often produces heart-wrenching drama.
Deputies find occupants hiding in attics. Children return from school to discover their bedrooms empty, their toys gone.
"It's the most emotional part of our job," said Precinct 7 Constable Clint Burgess.
Occasionally, evictees, feeling hopeless, turn suicidal.
This year the chief deputy constable in Precinct 1 returned to an apartment where he had posted an eviction notice. Todd Tiemann found the occupant's body hanging in a bedroom. Before taking his life, the man had laid out a poker hand -- known as Wild Bill Hickok's "dead man's" hand -- which legend has it Hickok held at the time of his slaying in a saloon in the 1870s.
Aces and eights.
The deputies are businesslike and trained to be courteous, respectful -- and cautious. They never know what's behind locked doors.
During the summer, officers confronted a resident in east Fort Worth who threatened to blow up the house he occupied if anyone tried to enter. A deputy handcuffed the man, who was being ousted by his daughter, and bomb-sniffing dogs were sent in before officers secured the property.
The financially irresponsible invite eviction.
Others are victims of circumstance, such as homeowners who lose their jobs or the renter who faithfully makes monthly payments to a landlord who, in turn, doesn't pay the mortgage company.
"For every deadbeat we put out, there is someone who is trying to do the right thing but can't make ends meet," said Thrasher, Precinct 3's chief deputy constable.
Last year an elderly blind man couldn't understand why uniformed deputies in Precinct 8 stood at his door. What was happening? "My rent is paid," he feebly protested. Unbeknownst to him, deputies said, relatives to whom he had entrusted his Social Security check had stopped making his payments months earlier and used the cash to buy drugs.
Everything the poor man owned was placed next to the curb.
After deputies drive away from a property, neighbors or passers-by swoop in to pick over and take unguarded belongings.
Some residents move out before the patrol cars arrive and spare themselves the indignity and embarrassment of forcible eviction.
They may leave behind much or all of their possessions. Some abandon pets. Some steal whatever they can: light fixtures, faucets, even doorknobs and drawer handles. Others knock holes in walls or take a hammer to ceramic tile floors out of spite.
Others remain in denial. They may tear up an eviction order, like a parking ticket.
'Praying for a miracle'
"Sir, didn't you know this was going to happen?" a Precinct 7 deputy asked.
"I was praying for a miracle," the Mansfield resident replied.
His wife and two children were still in their pajamas as the officer camped on the front steps of the $300,000, two-story home, prepared to carry out the court order.
A woman in a south Arlington neighborhood recently lost her three-bedroom home after falling four months behind on her $1,500 rent.
She didn't begin making phone calls to get a moving truck until after a deputy constable showed up and workers began carrying out thousands of dollars worth of furnishings -- two four-poster beds, wingback chairs, a big-screen television, collections of gleaming crystal.
Some own little if anything. With no place else to go, they refuse to leave until forced.
The woman in apartment 306 was unemployed. She lives off Supplemental Security Income, a federal program that provides cash for food, clothing and shelter. Her rent was $174. The property manager said she hadn't paid in three months.
Addressing her by her first name, the deputy politely said, "It's time." When the 51-year-old tenant reluctantly stepped aside, Caster and the other deputy entered the sparsely furnished place where the woman had lived for about a year.
The eviction notice and court writ littered the unswept linoleum floor. A team of movers immediately began the "set out," the routine, dispassionate job of loading the occupant's belongings and removing them.
One cleaned out a bedroom. Another picked up five jars of peanut butter from the kitchenette counter.
The woman claimed that she suffers from "15 diseases" and needs a liver transplant. Prescription medications filled the shelves of one closet
"I'm dying. I'm dying!" the renter suddenly cried, lashing out in protest, her voice rising.
She shot a furious glance at a property manager.
"And you're putting me out on the street!"
The woman wiped at angry tears. Lit a cigarette. Punched in numbers on a cellphone.
Did she have family or someplace to go? Her answer was curt, bitter. "Hell no, I don't have family ..."
A portrait of despair, she stood in the living room and watched with resignation as movers worked quietly under the watchful eyes of the deputies whose job is to keep the peace.
They were almost finished now.
One poured out an open, half-empty bottle of Smirnoff Ice, a vodka drink.
He removed four plastic trays from the refrigerator's small freezer and dumped the ice cubes into the sink.
Within 45 minutes -- by 9:30 a.m. -- the place was empty, the duty done.
"Carolyn," the deputy said, "we've changed the locks. You're not allowed back on the property."
The woman lifted a palm to her forehead as if feeling faint.
"Do you hear me?" the officer said firmly. "If you come back, they can file criminal trespass against you."
Grabbing her purse, she headed down the hallway to an elevator. As she left the dark brick building through a back door, one of the other 230 apartment residents followed and called out after her, her tone almost taunting: "What you gonna do now?"
When last seen the former tenant was standing alongside the sum total of her displaced life, stuffed into boxes and paper sacks, everything -- including a plush stuffed animal, "my bed buddy," she called the teddy bear -- piled in a heap along West Second Street.
The process begins
Sidney Thompson sat behind his bench in a windowless room at the Poly Subcourthouse, flanked by the American and Texas flags.
Robed in black, a thick copy of the Texas Property Code within reach, the Precinct 8 Justice of the Peace looked over his glasses at the plaintiff.
"Why do you want to evict?" he asked routinely. His shaved head gleamed beneath a bank of fluorescent lights.
"Nonpayment of rent," came the reply.
"In the amount of?"
"$1,275.54."
"Plus court costs?"
"Yes," the plaintiff said.
Thompson began signing paperwork and declared, "I'm going to give you a default judgment. ... Today is the 29th. They'll have until the 4th [to move]. On the 5th you can pick up your writ of possession."
Next ...
Thompson rendered rulings, rapidly, one after another, until the room emptied. This unhappy scene plays out several mornings each week in courthouses countywide.
The judge has heard every story imaginable, yet is still surprised at times.
"I had a woman from Forest Hill whose house payment was $1,500 a month, and she wasn't making but $2,000-something," he said. "How can they give her a mortgage like that? When she had less than $1,000 to pay for everything else?" He sounded incredulous. "These mortgage companies just evict 'em out and sell the house to somebody else. ... The volume [of eviction cases] is pretty high. Sometimes 50 or 60 a day."
One plaintiff, Carol Samlowski, sells mobile homes. The real estate investor obtained a writ after a family that was habitually late making $525 monthly payments on a 2,200-square-foot property abruptly moved out.
The buyers had put down $1,500 and lived there for 13 months. Samlowski said the couple could have owned the place outright in 11 years.
"I didn't want to do this," she said when deputies arrived, "but they left me no choice."
Some with poor credit signed subprime loans. Other borrowers are falling behind, financially squeezed as the housing market weakens and the interest rates in adjustable mortgages rise.
One Christmas Eve
Chester Luckett knows how some evictees may perceive his deputies who post the red tags on their doors.
They are repo men with badges, as coldhearted as a cartoon villain.
"Oil Can Harry," Luckett said with a grin, referring to Mighty Mouse's feline archenemy.
The Precinct 8 constable understands the enmity. Luckett is still haunted by a sorrowful incident years ago.
"Sometimes these landlords get mad. They've been lied to and they got vengeance in their heart," he said.
One such property owner insisted that a renter had to go, immediately, and so on a cold December night -- Christmas Eve -- Luckett reluctantly appeared at a home and, feeling like Scrooge himself, instructed movers to follow him inside and empty the place.
"They took the Christmas tree, lights and all," Luckett recalled. "Out to the curb."
He told himself then that it didn't seem right -- it wasn't Christian. Luckett listens to his conscience and strives to carry out his responsibilities with a measure of sympathy and compassion. "Nobody is excluded from bad luck. This job tests your faith, and leaves you crying sometimes."
The constable reminds his six deputies that they are only a couple of missed paychecks from finding themselves in the same fix as those souls who, for whatever reasons, lose their homes.
"You've got a job to do, but you don't have to be a dog about it," Luckett said. "I tell 'em, 'Don't go in there like Wyatt Earp or Matt Dillon. First thing, you smile. Say 'Hello' and 'How are you?' Then you identify yourself. Those folks are already havin' a real bad day ..."
Like deputies in other precincts, Luckett's men sometimes go beyond the call of duty. They have dug into their own pockets to help a resident scrape together overdue rent. They buy sneakers for kids who find themselves homeless. They collect money to help an evictee pay for a moving truck. They buy holiday dinners.
Deputy Raymond Williby couldn't bear to leave that 90-year-old blind man sitting alone on the front porch. He put him in his patrol car and took him to the Presbyterian Night Shelter.
Another deputy, Arnold Holmes, practices what he preaches as pastor of Mount Nebo Missionary Baptist Church in north Fort Worth.
"You do what you have to do, and still extend some help," said Holmes, who quoted from Romans. "If you believe the Bible, all things work together for good to them who love the Lord and to them who are called according to his purpose.
"Bad things happen to everybody," Holmes said. "Sometimes, they lead to some good."
As Luckett cruised through a neighborhood near East Lancaster, he waved at a passer-by.
"Something else I'll never forget," the constable said, turning his unmarked car and heading toward the address of another "set out" already in progress.
Years ago, as a deputy, Luckett took an off-duty job as a guard at a south Fort Worth nightclub.
One evening, he noticed two patrons looking at him with keen interest.
Finally one of them, egged on by the other, walked up and confronted him. "I know you." He fixed Luckett with a level gaze. "You're the dude who put my mama out."
Evict the man's mother? "No. Nooo. Wasn't me," Luckett insisted. The uniformed officer wagged his head in denial.
"Yeah, it was. I recognize you ..."
Luckett, his heart picking up speed, braced himself, fearful that the exchange was about to escalate into trouble.
The stranger smiled and extended his hand.
"I want to thank you. You did everything for her you could. You were real nice about it."
How eviction works
The process of eviction in Tarrant County plays out over several weeks.
A property owner gives an occupant notice to vacate before filing an eviction suit.
The constable's office serves the defendant a citation for eviction that notifies the defendant of a court date. If the judge rules in favor of the plaintiff, the defendant has five days to move or appeal.
If the defendant does neither, the plaintiff buys an $85 writ of possession.
The constable's office then posts a red sign on the front door. The notice warns the occupant that if he or she doesn't vacate the premises after a specific date (no sooner than 24 hours after the posting) the occupant will be evicted and all possessions will be set outdoors -- whether or not the occupant is at home.
Getting help
Don't procrastinate if you're behind on your mortgage or face foreclosure.
First, call or write your lender's loss mitigation department, explain your situation and see whether a new payment plan can be worked out or whether the loan can be refinanced. Some lenders may suspend payments or rework the length of the loan.
If that doesn't work, consider selling the house or contact a credible nonprofit housing counselor.
Many agencies offer free advice to homeowners. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (800-569-4287) can provide the name of a housing counseling agency nearest you. If you have a Veterans Administration loan, you can call 800-827-1000 to get a referral to a financial counselor.
ACORN Housing offers a home equity loss prevention program with mortgage-delinquency counselors who can intervene to help homeowners who face foreclosure. The toll-free agency help line is 888-409-3557.
E-mail requests can be sent to help@acornhousing.org.
Source: McClatchy Newspapers
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