Safe at Home

To protect Nancy Sonduck’s rock of security, Shannon Bedard and the CFJ Community Advocacy team had to dig back through time, and outfox the wolf at her door.

By Tim Connor

By any measure, Nancy Sonduck had not lived an easy life in the 42 years before a strange thing happened outside her window on a sunny day in 1994. She’d fled a painfully unhappy home when she was a teenager, gotten married and divorced when she was young, and had been battling serious health problems that left her on disability and unable to work.

And now this. As she was sitting and visiting with her sons she heard an unearthly squeal coming from the street. She looked out to see her oldest son’s Volkswagen being shoved by a truck into her neighbor’s driveway.

“The truck was sitting half in the yard and half on the sidewalk,” she recounts. “I went out the door, went to the truck, and asked the driver ‘what are you doing?!’ The guy said, ‘oh, oh, I just fell asleep, I’ll pay for everything.’ So I walked out and around to see what happened to the car and as I was coming back around, I looked up and he was driving right at me.” The driver was drunk and it was not his truck. He would drive several blocks south, before fleeing on foot.

It was all Nancy could do to avoid being crushed. She blocked the truck with her arms and tried throwing herself out of the way. Luckily, she didn’t get run over but the impact of the fall caused injuries to her right hip, knee, and ankle. She didn’t break anything, but arthritis inflamed by the fall left her unable to walk and in need of pain medication.

The terrifying experience with the drunk driver explains why Shannon Bedard, in April of last year, noticed that the now 55-year-old woman making her way to the back conference room at the Center for Justice was walking with a limp. Shannon is a Master’s of Social Work student who has been doing her practicum work with the Center’s Community Advocacy program.

There were two other things that Shannon noticed about Nancy Sonduck. The first is that she was carrying a three inch stack of papers. The second is that almost as soon as she began to tell her story, Nancy began to sob due to her stress and fear.

The documents told a long and bitter story of one woman’s efforts to try to save her house. To the CFJ team, it didn’t look at all good. Among the items in the file was correspondence with the attorney Nancy had worked with in 2006 and 2007, before he moved his practice. He’d done the best he could to protect her assets, he wrote, but the advice in his closing letter was that she abandon the home.

If there was any room to think that the Center for Justice could do better than Nancy’s former lawyer, it was by no means obvious. It was the kind of case that could easily consume hundreds of hours of work. Because demand for Community Advocacy services is always greater than the Center’s resources, those hours would come at the expense of other cases where CFJ might have a much better chance to make a positive difference. That’s why a “decline” letter was prepared for Nancy Sonduck who, it turned out, was praying very hard not to get a decline letter.

The prayer was answered. Shannon Bedard’s phone call, telling Nancy to ignore the letter, got there before the postman did.

Why? After sleeping on it, Shannon had decided she would be an advocate to take the Sonduck case.

Suellen Pritchard, who coordinates the Community Advocacy program, remembers the conversation.

“I don’t think this case is as far gone as it seems, is what Shannon said.”

But now to take the case, Suellen would have to revisit her difficult decision, along with the decision of the program’s supervising attorney, to decline the case. But here a couple things weighed in Nancy Sonduck’s favor. The first was that Shannon Bedard felt strongly about at least doing some additional investigation. Suellen not only saw that, but saw that the investigation, itself, could be a useful learning experience for Bedard who, after all, had come to the Center to do her master’s level practicum work.

The second factor had to do with whom Nancy Sonduck is. She may be disabled, but she’s not a recluse.  Among other things, she’s been very active in several civic organizations for the disadvantaged in Spokane, including working as a volunteer for Christ Kitchen, a north Spokane ministry that serves women in poverty.

“I remember Shannon saying, ‘this woman does so much for the community, if anybody deserves answers, she does.’ It was definitely a pay-it-forward kind of case.” And, to know Suellen, is to know that she’s a pay-it-forward kind of woman. She took the case back to John Sklut, who was then the program’s supervising attorney.

“He was a little skeptical,” Suellen recalls, “but he said, ‘okay, I trust your judgment.’”

If there was any room to think that the Center for Justice could do what her first lawyer couldn’t, it wasn’t obvious. It was the kind of case that could consume countless hours, hours better spent on other cases where the chances to make a difference were better. Nancy prayed she wouldn’t get a decline letter. Her prayer was answered.

The rock in Nancy Sonduck’s life is her home. At only 816 square feet, it’s a small blue cottage with white trim and a brick chimney. Two bedrooms and a bath. It sits in the Shadle neighborhood along a side street off the Maple-Ash corridor. It is well maintained on the outside and inside it is a cozy temple to Nancy’s family, faith, and interests that happen to include turtles and artwork featuring turtles.

“Turtles are about earth grounding, faith and perseverance,” she explains, “and that’s why I relate to them so well.”

Just a few weeks after she was bowled over by the rampaging truck in front of her house, Nancy decided her home needed a new pair of both storm windows and storm doors. So when a sales team representing a Nebraska-based home improvement company canvassed her neighborhood she decided to invite them in. It turned out to be one of the worst mistakes of her life.

Once the salesmen were in, they wouldn’t leave. Moreover, once they were in, they had their own strong views on how many and what kind of doors she really needed. The hours dragged on. One contract was produced. Then another. Worn down by fatigue, hunger, and the pain from her recent injuries, she gave in.

“I just decided, okay, okay, okay, they weren’t going to leave until it was signed,” she says. “this was like eight o’clock at night and they’d been there since Adam [the youngest of her three sons] had come home from school. Later I figured out there were two contracts for different amounts of money and they were replacing windows that didn’t need to be replaced. They basically lied to me.”

It was more work than she wanted and much of it was slipshod. Ten years earlier, while suffering from a serious swelling around her optic nerves, she had darkened the living room because the sunlight was painful to her eyes. The light shield caused some mold to grow on the window but the window simply needed to be cleaned. She did not need the new window that the unyielding salesmen ordered up for her. A window installed in her bathroom, that she didn’t need either, wasn’t correctly sealed and the resulting leak damaged her wall.

Realizing how badly she’d been gauged and taken advantage of, Nancy stopped paying on the bill after she paid her first installment and says she reported the incident to Spokane police. The police, she says, told her there was nothing they could do because the contractor was out of state. What ensued was a decade-long standoff, where she refused to pay on the $10,000 bill unless and until the company reduced the size of the bill to something she believed was fair. The company wouldn’t change the bill, and began hounding her for payment.

“Sometimes they would call me twenty times a day,” she said. “Every half hour I would get another call.”

There were other bills to pay, including an old doctor’s bills that had gone to collections even though she had continued to make a $25 monthly payment on it. Her diminished mobility after the truck incident led to additional expenses, such as a new wheelchair ramp. It also included a new yard sprinkler system but that was installed by a contractor who thoroughly dug up her yard and then demanded payment in full before putting in the pipes.

These were some of the other wolves at her door, but the biggest wolf was the unyielding home improvement company. Her stress escalated, further inflaming her respiratory problems and her arthritis.

She would get new medication but, she says, “medication isn’t going to stop someone who is harassing you and threatening to take your home.”

As a result of her divorce, the home had been in foreclosure in 1978, but she had managed to scrape through thanks in part to a favorable court ruling. But now there were more debts and her only income is her social security and disability. In 2006, she finally swallowed her pride and sought legal assistance in declaring bankruptcy, so that she could at least keep her home.

The bankruptcy did prune off some of her monthly expenses. But she was still left in a precarious financial condition. Her hopes of keeping her home rested on being able to “reaffirm” her payments on two loans, the largest of the two being the second mortgage on her house. But as her lawyer explained in a March 2007 letter, he could not honor her request to make the reaffirmations because the law and court rules require the debtor to show “that the reaffirmation of the debt will not represent an undue hardship for the debtor.”

“The woman at the title company warned me, ‘that’s a needle in a haystack, and you’re never going to find that needle.’” –Shannon Bedard

It was not, he concluded, a showing she could make, and thus he encouraged her to “let your house go back to the creditors who have a secured interest in the property so you can begin your fresh start.”

To Nancy Sonduck’s surprise, the biggest of the wolves was still there. The contract with the Nebraska-contractor had survived bankruptcy because it had been secured with a mortgage lien, and the original $10,000 bill was now, with penalties and interest, at nearly $30,000. What was worse is that the debt had been sold to an equally aggressive, Omaha-based finance company which had learned of the bankruptcy and promptly wrote Sonduck to notify her they intended to collect. They would accept payment of $22,444.80, promptly, or they would begin foreclosure proceedings.

It was with this terrifying news that Nancy Sonduck came to the Center for Justice in April of last year to seek help.

Looking back on it, Shannon admits there was no possible way she could be at all sure that she could help Nancy Sonduck stay in her home. But she did think that she could address the anguish, that she could at least help Nancy make sense of what had happened to her.

“The more I’m here,” Shannon says, “the more I’m convinced that this is the nut of it. If someone can just understand how they’ve come to this spot, then they can move forward.”

Shannon and the CA team reached the same conclusion as Sonduck’s earlier lawyer about the predatory sales contract. Nancy had been taken advantage of, but as her lawyer informed her the year before, the statute of limitations to take legal action had long since expired.

But what Shannon couldn’t easily accept was the notion that it was therefore a hopeless task to keep Nancy Sonduck in her home.

“We often have people who come in here without a shred of paperwork,” Shannon says. “If there’s paperwork, I know there’s a trail, and if there’s a trail, it’s a matter of sorting it out and seeing where all the threads go, and that gave me hope that it could be sorted out.”

The gist of her hope was in Nancy’s records and Nancy herself because even though Shannon has worked as a bank teller and an assistant librarian, to do the needed research was going to be time-consuming and require Nancy’s guidance. At least here, there was reason to be optimistic. Nancy had committed herself to becoming healthier, had lost a considerable amount of excess weight, and was out of her wheelchair, anxious to help.

Another ray of hope was that Nancy’s long-time bank hadn’t played hard ball. Even though it had a right to foreclose on the house after the required “reaffirmation” couldn’t be provided as part of the bankruptcy, the bank had held off because it was still receiving monthly payments, in full, on the mortgage. With the mortgage was a line of credit that Nancy had used, in the past, to absorb other home improvement projects like the wheelchair ramp. But now that line of credit was locked up.

That was a key problem because in Shannon’s strategy for saving Nancy Sonduck’s home, she needed the bank. It was the only conceivable source for the money she and the Center would need to negotiate a final resolution. But to get the bank to re-open the tap on the line of credit, she had to look elsewhere, and she had to get lucky.

“I was trying to see if I could get a multitude of people, who all had interests in this, to play ball,” she says.

After 34 years, the liens against the home formed an odd and complicated pile, such that the bank’s position was behind that of the Omaha finance company that now owned  the predatory window installer’s loan. So Shannon and CFJ were literally in a position of having to get money from a party further down on the debt totem pole to pay off someone closer to the top. That looked to be impossible.

Except that, by then, Shannon had examined the title on the property and noticed that there were liens ahead of both the finance company and the bank. It was with that knowledge that Shannon asked the skeptical bank officer, if the bank might re-visit the freeze on the line of credit if CFJ could put the bank in a better position. He didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no.

“That was the ONLY thing I could come up with,” Shannon says.

As the stress from the constant hounding inflamed her health problems, her doctor explored new medicines. But, says Nancy Sonduck, “new medication isn’t going to stop someone who’s harassing you and threatening to take your home.”

She kept going and learned an interesting thing. At least two of the liens showing on the title were what are known as “ghost liens.” They were remnants of loans secured against the property that had already been paid off, but had not been removed from the title.

Now there was real hope.

“With Shannon,” Suellen recalls, “it was one ‘ah-hah’ moment and another ‘ah-hah’ moment with that case. So she incorporated several resources into figuring it out. She just wasn’t quitting.”

One of the ghost liens, that had actually been completely paid off in 2001, went back more than thirty years and Shannon needed help interpreting the logged information.

Says Shannon: “The woman at the title company warned me, ‘that’s a needle in a haystack and you’re never going to find that needle.”

Figuring there had to have been a lawyer involved, she actually did find out who the lawyer was. She also learned he would unlikely be of any help without a seance since he would now be 107 years old.

Finally, she decided to do a Google search on a number that the woman at the title company thought might be able to get her somewhere.

“And up popped this thing in Florida,” she said.

She put a big star next to it in her file and, because her spring term was over, she handed the Sonduck file off to Saundra Richartz, an incoming CFJ summer intern. In short, Shannon and Saundra found the needle. When Richartz contacted the Florida company and told the man on the phone the story, he not only pulled the certificate of satisfaction but because the company was also anxious to resolve the matter, it actually sent a filing fee payment with the certificate.

“If you could have seen Saundra’s face!” Suellen remembers. “It was worth a million bucks. She was just like, ‘we did it! we did it! We finally found the piece of paper we needed to clear her title, to save her house!’”

Now all they had to do was deal with the bank, and the company in Omaha.

In handing the file off to Saundra, Shannon says she was careful to deliver instructions.

“With Shannon,” Suellen recalls, “it was one ‘ah-hah’ moment and another ‘ah-hah’ moment with that case. So she incorporated several resources into figuring it out. She just wasn’t quitting.”

“I’d told Saundra that the key to all this is we need to work through and resolve everything in this stack of liens. But then we need to hold them. We can’t file them. At this point I could see that things were going to break loose. We were going to break this log jam up.”

But timing was everything because if the Omaha company saw that its position was improving in the line of creditors, as Shannon and Saundra gradually cleared up the other liens, it would just make it more difficult to negotiate with because they would be closer to having a first claim on the house.

“What we wanted them to believe in our negotiations with them,” Shannon said, “is that they’re still in seventh position, and dream on, they’re never going to get anywhere. So they better settle for what they can get, because they’re never going to move forward.”

Sonduck’s bank, Shannon said, was in on the plan and would, of course, benefit. A closing agreement with the Omaha company would vault the bank into a much better security position on its outstanding mortgage with Nancy Sonduck. And it was with that quid pro quo understanding that they agreed to unfreeze the line of credit and make a loan for $5,000, the sum Saundra Richartz negotiated over the phone with the company in Omaha.

Right. $5,000.

“Did you get that in writing?” Shannon asked Saundra.

The end of the story came last September, when Shannon sent Nancy Sonduck the “satisfaction of mortgage” that signified the end to the 14-year battle with the window company that refused to leave. As you would expect, Nancy filed it carefully, complete with Shannon’s big yellow post-it attached.

“I was just kind of numb,” she says. “Ecstatic and numb. Nobody can take my house. Nobody can threaten me anymore.”

The full weight of the reprieve didn’t hit her until New Year’s Day when she realized that, for the first time in what seemed like ages, she was beginning a new year without the fear of losing her home.

She can’t say enough about Shannon Bedard and the rest of the Community Advocacy team at the Center for Justice.

“The peace of mind you’ve given me has almost restored my soul,” she says.

–CFJ