Foreclosure auction during Irma leaves cloud over family's future

In addition to hundreds of people made homeless quickly by Hurricane Irma, a Jacksonville, Fla., family may learn this week whether they, too, lost their house during the storm.

It was sold in a foreclosure auction the morning the hurricane shut down the city.

"I said, 'How in the world can that have happened when everything was closed?'" said Jack Jones, an octogenarian whose home in the Bartram Springs area near the St. Johns County line was put up for sale online while the Duval County Courthouse was locked and empty.

Jones' family and Wells Fargo, the bank that foreclosed, are both asking the judge who handled the case to invalidate the sale. The bank's lawyer argued the sale violated state law.

"There has been an irregularity in the foreclosure sale," attorney Heather Griffiths said in a motion to circuit Judge Thomas Beverly's office.

She said courthouse clerk's staff hadn't followed a state law requiring public access to computer terminals for the auction at "a designated location."

The clerk of courts normally has terminals available during auctions in six rooms of the courthouse but those weren't used during the storm, said Brian Corrigan, a clerk's office spokesman.

The courthouse was closed Sept. 8-15 for storm preparations and damage cleanup. Almost all of state and city government was closed immediately before and during the hurricane, which hit Jacksonville on Sept. 11 with damaging winds and high water that contributed to historic floods throughout the region.

Beverly has scheduled a hearing Thursday on arguments about the motions, which the bank and the Joneses filed separately. The hearing could also involve representatives of a Westside real estate trust that apparently controls the high bidder for the Jones property.

The court docket on the foreclosure was updated Friday to say a title to the property wouldn't be issued until Beverly ruled on the motions.

Twenty foreclosed properties in Duval County were sold in online auctions Sept. 11 and 12, a Monday and a Tuesday, while many others were canceled or rescheduled that week for a variety of reasons. No auctions were held those days in Clay and Nassau counties, which along with Duval County comprise the state's Fourth Judicial Circuit.

State law has allowed clerks of court to handle foreclosure sales online since 2008, and many clerks use the same software to schedule and run the sales.

The Sept. 11 auction for the Joneses' property was scheduled in May, after Wells Fargo convinced Beverly that month to reschedule the sale because it was working on an agreement to restore regular mortgage payments. Jones asked in late August to have the date extended again, noting the family was working with a foreclosure-prevention program to clear up financial problems.

But on Sept. 7, the last day the courthouse was open before the hurricane, Beverly signed an order denying another delay and leaving the sale scheduled for Sept. 11.

Holding an auction while the rest of the court system is shut down poses real legal problems, said Chip Parker, a Jacksonville attorney who works extensively in foreclosure law. One of those starts from the fact that the federal courthouse and its U.S. Bankruptcy Court, two blocks away from the county courthouse, closed for the storm, too.

Filing for bankruptcy and facing the consequence that carries is one way to get a foreclosure sale canceled almost up to the minute the auction starts, Parker said. Four sales that had been scheduled for Sept. 11 or 12 were canceled because of bankruptcies.

But since there was no one in either courthouse, there was no way to use that option, and Parker said that created a "terrible" situation for people losing their homes.

He said he talked to someone who needed an attorney to challenge one of the sales, but he hadn't taken the case because he wasn't sure whose side the law supported.

Jones said losing his family's house would probably represent a loss of more than $100,000 because of the equity built up in the home used by him and his 74-year-old wife and adult daughter.

Daughter Jacqueline Jones, 43, who was paralyzed in a car wreck and uses a wheelchair, said a lot of work and expense had gone into making the house handicapped-accessible.

Jacqueline Jones said the family had been trying to work out changes to their mortgage but lost valuable time to communication problems with the lender.

For example, she said, she was told after completing a mortgage modification application that it couldn't be accepted because of a policy against starting modifications too close to an auction date — then learned she had been too close to the auction date the whole time she'd been applying.

The Joneses said they haven't been contacted by anyone about moving out of the house.

Jacqueline Jones said her family is working with a foreclosure-prevention program, the Florida Hardest-Hit Fund, but it's not clear how fast a solution can be found. The Hardest-Hit website warns visitors that organizations taking part in the program face extra problems because they too were damaged by Irma.

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