Miami Woman Loses Home Of 40+ Years After Being Scammed In Home Improvement Ripoff

In Miami, Florida, WPLG-TV Channel 10 reports:

• From the driver's seat of her large forest green sedan, Angela Samuels looked on her parents' modest pink-hued Liberty City home with a glazed expression Wednesday. Fellow community activists picked from the pile of belongings scattered across the front lawn and placed them in the car for her. There were buckets stuffed with clothes wedged into the trunk and back seat.
  
  
• After years of fighting her eviction, Samuels seemed a bit stunned that this is how it would end. Maybe her optimism kept her from ever processing this possibility, that she would be kicked out of the home she's lived in for more than 40 years.
  
  
• Samuels' problems started after her parents died. According to Occupy Miami community organizer Kevin Young, her parents didn't leave a will, and so the home ended up in probate.
  
  
• At the time, he said, there was a mortgage of $7,000, and while Samuels was trying to work out a loan to pay off the debt, she said someone duped her.
  
  
• A man promising to help her fix up the home conned her, she said, into taking equity out of the home, and then he vanished with the cash without making any improvements. Now faced with a loan bigger than she could afford, Samuels was stuck and her family home was in jeopardy.

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• Samuels said her father was a pastor, and her mother a missionary. That home was the community's home. Those in pain, those who were homeless, those who needed a meal, she said, all knew they could come to 1740 NW 46th St. That's why her favorite room was the "great room," the big room in the front where everyone would come and hang out, in some cases crash for the night.

For the story, see Woman loses eviction fight from Liberty City home.