Part II: The faces of foreclosure

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second in a series of stories looking at the foreclosure crisis in Manatee County.

The faces of foreclosure are many. From the couple moving out of state, who got caught in the downward spiral of the housing market with two house payments, to the investor with medical bills forced to sell his business and lose his home.

We tell the stories of some of those involved in the 2,528 foreclosure suits filed in 2007.

Vicki and Eric Lee

Vicki and Eric Lee were excited about the possibility of moving to Tennessee.

They figured they would take a negative - Eric's job being caught in the downsizing at Chris-Craft - and make it a positive.

"We'd been talking about moving to Tennessee," said Vicki, a singer. "We were checking out the job market and it looked good."

Little did the Lees know that the July 2006 move would be a road to financial disaster. The couple ended up caught in Florida's housing meltdown, with two mortgages, only one job and declining housing values.

Their excellent credit rating was destroyed and Vicki developed high blood pressure and diabetes.

"It was extremely painful and stressful to say the least for both Eric and I," she said. "It's not something we would ever want to be a part of ever again."

In early 2006, they had found a home they liked in Tennessee and were approved by their bank SunTrust for another mortgage in March 2006.

They put their Bradenton home near Manatee Community College on the market; housing was still hot. They listed their 3,000 square-foot, 4-bedroom, 3-bath home for $325,000 through Buy Owner. They had purchased the home for $69,000 more than 15 years ago, and had completed a $75,000 addition and remodeled the kitchen and bath.

They moved to Tennessee in July 2006. For 1½ years, the Lees were flooded with calls and emails from prospective buyers. The house attracted lots of attention, but nobody could get financing.

"We had five friends with keys who showed it like crazy," she said. "A couple of people wanted to run a business out of it and the zoning allows for that, but it fell through."

The Lees found themselves paying between $3,500 and $4,000 for both mortgages each month. Eric had found a job but Vicki wasn't as lucky. In early 2007, the two knew they were starting to fall behind.

"I worked daily calling the banks to try and save the house," Vicki said. "I ran myself ragged trying to find a way to qualify for some help."

The Lees went through all their financial reserves. "We exhausted all of our resources including my husband's IRA, my money market, and our savings," Vicki said. "We ever even forced to sell things just to keep current."

Finally the couple turned to SunTrust for help. They faxed over reams of documents to several departments and hoped a short sale offer of $225,000 would go through. The Lees owed $270,000 on their loan.

They found themselves caught in financial red tape since they had two loans, a mortgage and an equity loan on the house.

"The bank just drug their feet, drug their feet, drug their feet. I had to refax 50-plus pages of documents to different departments," Vicki said. "It was like they didn't talk to each other."

The Herald's calls to SunTrust for comment were not returned.

The short sale fell through and Dec. 17, 2007, the Lees lost their home.

Today they are making a life for themselves in Tennessee and are still glad they made the move.

"All of our friends and relatives in Florida are struggling with taxes, insurance and everything," Vicki said. "At least we have hope."

Janie Smith

For Janie Smith, hope had all but run out when her lender, Wells Fargo, filed foreclosure on her 28th Avenue East home in Bradenton last June.

"It's not fun being on the edge of knowing that you could lose your house at any time," she says.

Smith, who was forced to quit her job as a bookkeeper at Albertson's after a 2004 car accident left her with chronic pain, struggled to keep current with payments.

Her husband, who also worked for Albertson's, lost his job to a store closure in 2006 and the couple had to resort to dipping into his retirement fund and severance package to pay bills and make the mortgage.

Smith's lender, Wells Fargo, filed for foreclosure on the home in June 2007.

She was able to stave off foreclosure by paying the lender $7,000 from her car accident settlement, but was still behind in payments, in part because she was spending $404 a month for COBRA health insurance.

"At one time I didn't have any health insurance and I have to have the (pain) medication Lyrica and that's $118 (per prescription) and I had to get my medicine," Smith recalls. "I had to write them a letter explaining my situation and what was going on, and then I had to do another six-month payment plan."

Just this month, Smith says, she received a letter from Wells Fargo, notifying her that she was current again on her payments of roughly $800 a month.

"It took almost two years of trying to work out plans with them to be able to get back on a normal schedule," Smith said. "They told me if I defaulted on any of my payments I would lose my home. That was it."

Smith now works part-time as a phlebotomist and is trying to get a full-time position.

"It's been hard," Smith said. "We've had our lights cut off a couple of times or our water cut off just so we could make the mortgage, because I'm not working a lot. There's a lot of things we've had to do without. We don't go fishing any more. We don't go to movies. We really don't do anything outside of the home; we don't usually drive because of the price of gas."

Francis Lyden

Francis Lyden was having difficulty keeping a tenant in his single-family investment home in the Covered Bridge Estates community in Ellenton.

Then his wife suffered a massive heart attack in 2006 and the medical bills began to mount.

Lyden, 67, resorted to selling his Fantastic Sams franchise in Ellenton to pay his wife's medical expenses and keep the mortgage on the home current.

But it was too much.

As the real estate market cooled, Lyden tried to sell the home with an assessed value of $260,000.

He owed $254,925 in principal, interest and late fees, according to court documents.

Lyden said he had a buyer who was willing to pay $225,000 for the home and he approached his lender, Aurora Loan Services, about doing a short sale of the property.

The lender turned down the deal, Lyden said.

Lyden repeatedly attempted to work with the lender and explain the situation with his wife, to no avail.

A call to an Aurora Loan Services spokesperson was not returned.

"They didn't listen. They didn't care," Lyden said. "To me, personally, none of them really care. I'm glad I'm done with it. It was putting stress on my wife. It was putting stress on me."

Lyden realizes his credit is ruined.

"My credit was 820, my whole life," Lyden said. "I never missed a payment, ever in my life. Now it's done."

Cecil and Antoinette Carter

Cecil and Antoinette Carter found themselves facing foreclosure after taking out two equity lines to make repairs on their 1,600-square-foot home on 17th Street East in Bradenton.

Not only did the home need a new roof, but the interior needed upgrading and new carpeting because of Antoinette Carter's allergies and asthma.

Their first loan in 2004 was from Ameriquest for $112,000, which replaced their former mortgage and gave them $20,000 for home improvements.

But the cost of the improvements outstripped the loan and the Carters were forced to refinance again a year later to complete the work.

This time they got a loan from Fremont Mortgage for $168,000 that replaced the Ameriquest mortgage and gave them $33,000 for improvements. Fremont subsequently sold the loan to U.S. Bank.

The loan came with a teaser rate of 8.7 percent that gave the couple a monthly payment of $1,588. They had been paying $776 a month on their former mortgage, Atoinette Carter recalled.

With Cecil Carter earning $800 a month from Social Security and his wife making $11 an hour as a part-time certified nursing assistant, the couple couldn't keep up.

"We couldn't do it," Antoinette Carter said. "I could believe it."

The initial mortgage rate was scheduled to reset to 14.7 percent in January, raising the couple's monthly payment to $1,800.

But they didn't make it that far.

U.S. Bank filed for foreclosure in November; the Carters owe $181,000 in principal, interest and late fees on a home last assessed for tax purposes in 2007 at $103,000.

A Manatee County judge issued an order of foreclosure in March. The couple's attorney, Dawn Marie Bates-Buchanan of Gulfcoast Legal Services in Bradenton, is trying to get the judgment set aside on grounds that the terms of the loan constituted predatory lending.

"How someone in their situation - her working part-time at $11 an hour, him on a fixed income of $800 a month - can qualify for a loan for $168,000, the numbers don't really match up that way," Bates-Buchanan said. "The (lender) should have said, 'You don't qualify.' Now they're in a situation that a home that Mrs. Carter has had since 1979, they're going to lose."

Daniel Hilley, a spokesman for Fremont, the originator of the loan, said the company had no comment.

Fremont was at the center of the subprime mortgage crisis. In March 2007, the FDIC ordered the company to stop making risky loans.

On May 5, Reuters reported that the Massachusetts Appeals Court upheld an injunction to force Fremont to halt foreclosures in the state in order to allow authorities to review individual mortgages.

The Carters say they wouldn't have any place to go in the event they lose their home.

"My husband don't read and he don't write," Antoinette Carter said. "I'm the one that goes through everything with him. It makes me feel so bad. Betrayed."

Robin Morrissey

Robin Morrissey is hoping to stay in her home if it is foreclosed, even though she doesn't own it - in honor of a late friend.

"I want to carry on what he started," she said of Charles Guy, who owned the home on 33rd Avenue West but died in December 2006.

Morrissey and Guy first met in 1999 while working for the Manatee County Humane Society. Despite a 33-year age difference, the two became fast friends largely because they shared an Irish heritage and a deep love of animals, especially cats.

Guy was known as "the Cat Man" because he took care of several feral cat colonies throughout Manatee, including one on his property. He also was an actor, appearing in several productions by the Island Players and Manatee Players.

But when his health began deteriorating in 2004, Morrissey began helping take care of him and moved into the house at Guy's request in early 2006. His kidneys began failing, requiring dialysis, then a search for a kidney donor.

Guy, a lifelong bachelor with no children, couldn't get a kidney from family members because they had diabetes like he did. Morrissey, who said she and Guy often joked that they might have a common Irish ancestor, offered to be tested to see if she was a match.

To their surprise, she was.

They began making plans for the transplant and beyond. Morrissey said Guy repeatedly said he wanted her to have the house in case he died, and began taking the legal steps to make that happen.

But Guy broke his shoulder and hip in an early September fall, leading to soaring medical bills that depleted his savings and exhausted his insurance benefits. Morrissey said she and Jay Borchers, another friend of Guy's who moved into the house in September, took care of the property and its felines while Guy recovered.

Doctors were optimistic that Guy would be able to undergo the transplant surgery in early 2007, Morrissey said. So Guy was in no hurry to file a will and make legal arrangements regarding the house, she said.

"He and I had a firm agreement that by the time we were tablebound, when we had a date (for the transplant), that we would have everything finalized. But we didn't make it that far," she said.

Guy died Dec. 21, 2006. Seven months later, Wachovia Bank sued to foreclose on the house, saying he owed $45,000 of the $50,000 he had borrowed from Wells Fargo to buy the house in 2002.

Wells Fargo previously had sold the mortgage to Wachovia, court records show.

Since then, Morrissey and Borchers have tried talking to the lender about purchasing the home but say they have gotten nowhere.

"We've heard every excuse in the book except our ability or inability to repay a loan," Morrissey said. She said she were paying rent until Guy died.

A Wachovia spokeswoman declined to comment, citing the pending litigation and consumer confidentiality.

The foreclosure case is now in its ninth month, prolonged by Guy's estate going through probate. Wachovia has asked the court to foreclose on the house, but the judge has not yet ruled on the request.

Morrissey is resigned to the fact the house will be foreclosed on, anticipating it will happen within 60 days. She also expects someone else will buy the house because it's worth more than what's owed on it.

She hopes the new owner will allow her, Borchers and Guy's cats to remain.

"I love it here," she said. Home repairs, medical bills, an out-of-state move cause heartache, financial woes