The Pain of Foreclosure

She planted flowers. Tubaya built a screened-in back porch. The little duplex on Bar Harbor Drive was so much more than a house to her. She taped a photo of it to her kitchen window, and every time she looked at it she thought, "You've accomplished something."

Her niece has her own bedroom and a room, decorated with Tweety Bird wallpaper, for her Easy-Bake Oven and Barbie dolls. There also is plenty of room for Griffin's two grown children to stay on occasional weekends.

Then, life changed unexpectedly. While sitting at the dining room table at 6:18 on Christmas morning 2004, Tubaya, who had been up all night cooking Christmas dinner, had a massive heart attack and died. He was 45. Suddenly, the monthly mortgage payments were too much for Griffin to handle alone. She had drained the plastic jug of its savings, and Tubaya's life insurance went to his mother.

A few weeks later, Griffin called Ameriquest Mortgage -- she and Tubaya had refinanced with the company to pay for the porch -- asking for a deferral and to have Tubaya's name removed from the deed.

An Ameriquest agent came to her home about midnight, she said, and had her sign a sheaf of papers. Griffin said she thought she was signing to remove Tubaya's name from the deed. Instead, she later learned, she had refinanced into an expensive $153,000 subprime loan with an adjustable interest rate that was set to rise to as much as 14 percent in coming years.

In September 2005, after having failed to pay her $1,127 monthly mortgage for several months, Griffin filed for reorganization under Chapter 13 of the federal bankruptcy code. What she did not know, however, was that Ameriquest had already decided to foreclose on her. Attorneys for the current lender -- Ameriquest was taken over by Citigroup in August -- said in court papers that it sent her notices of the impending May 2, 2006, auction. She said she never received them.

On May 18, she found the note on her door.

Griffin was stunned. "They shouldn't be able to take our homes from us out of the blue like this," she said. Griffin called Robinson, at Civil Justice in Baltimore, which helps homeowners in foreclosure negotiate deals to keep their homes. Robinson maintains that Griffin's constitutional right to due process was violated. He sued in Anne Arundel Circuit Court and lost and has filed with the Maryland Court of Appeals.

Robinson said 24 states require that lenders have proof that homeowners have received notices of foreclosure before any sale takes place, either through certified mail, a process server, a posting on the property or some combination of the three. In Virginia and the District, foreclosures are covered by contract law and not considered judicial proceedings, so there is no legal requirement that homeowners receive notification before a sale.

Jacob Geesing, an attorney representing the lender that has acquired the loan, declined to comment on the pending litigation. He argued in Circuit Court that Ameriquest fully complied with Maryland law and sent Griffin three notices of the impending foreclosure, by certified and first-class mail. He acknowledged that the certified letters sent to Griffin were returned unopened. He said it is "remarkable" that Griffin did not receive any of the three foreclosure notices sent by first-class mail. Griffin testified, he argued in court filings, "that, except for all mail of any kind relating to her mortgage default and pending foreclosure sale of her home -- from any source whatsoever -- that she had never had any problem receiving mail addressed to her." Even if the Postal Service misdelivered the first-class mail, he argued, the lender could not be blamed for Griffin not knowing about the foreclosure. "It would be unfortunate, but it wouldn't be unconstitutional," he said, according to court transcripts.

Consumer advocacy groups, which have filed friend of the court briefs on behalf of homeowners, say that the recent crisis shows flaws in the system. "When you see the run-up in foreclosures like we're seeing, that's when you see a lot of the idiosyncrasies exposed in state foreclosure laws," said Allen J. Fishbein of the Consumer Federation of America. "And the fact is that many of these laws are not consumer-friendly."

Griffin's new fiance, a long-haul trucker, has put up a $13,000 bond to keep her in the home while the court case is pending. And, because Griffin is now out of work and on disability after several wrist surgeries, he is paying $1,200 a month toward the interest on the loan. If she had known about the foreclosure, she said, she could have at least sold the home, paid off the loan and had more than $100,000 in equity -- the house was valued at more than $300,000 in 2006 -- to help her start over. Now, if she loses in court, she will have nothing.