Foreclosed Homeowners Opt Against Pressing Criminal Charges Against Neighbors Who Looted Their Home Under Mistaken Belief It Was Abandoned

In Aurora, Illinois, WBBM-TV Channel 2 reports:

• There will be no charges filed against the neighbors who picked clean an Aurora home they believed had been abandoned. As WBBM Newsradio’s Pat Cassidy reports, Mike Stapleton and his wife, Susan Kendall, had moved most of their possessions out of their home on Downer Place in Aurora before turning the home over to the bank and moving off to Kansas.
  
  But when they returned for the rest [o]f their personal belogings, the Aurora Beacon-News reports they discovered that neighbors had cleaned up – and cleaned out – the house.
  
  The neighbors entered the house without permission, and took about $3,000 worth of property from the house, including Stapleton’s lawnmower, hedge trimmer, and other gardening implements, the Chicago Sun-Times reported last month.
  
  The neighbors even took personal items of sentimental value such as family photos and heirlooms, the Sun-Times reported.
  
  Aurora Ald. Rick Lawrence (4th) said he was called by a neighbor about the trash left behind, the Sun-Times reported. The neighbor wanted the house cleaned up.
  
  Lawrence said he was inside the house shortly after the neighbors had picked over and taken many of the items, the Sun-Times reported.
  
  But Stapleton tells the newspaper the air conditioning was still on and the utilities were still in the family’s name, and they would never have abandoned the house with everything inside. He told the paper that no one had a right to barge into the house and take anything he or she wanted.
  
  Still, while police could have filed charges against the neighbors, they did not, because the owners did not want to press charges, the Beacon-News reported.

Source: No Charges For Neighbors Who Looted Family’s Home In Aurora.