Handyman turns the tables on squatters who took over his mother's house

Fox News ^ | 3/25/23 | Hannah Ray Lambert

[Libloather]

A handyman turned the tables on suspected squatters who took over his mother's Northern California home.

"If they could take a house, then I could take a house," Flash Shelton of the United Handyman Association said in a YouTube video. "They're the squatter, and they have rights. Well, then, if I become the squatter on the squatter, then I should have rights, right?"

Shelton's video detailing his quest to reclaim the California home has garnered more than two million views on YouTube.

Shelton said his father recently passed away, and his mother couldn't live in the house on her own. So they put it up for rent.

**SNIP**

So he hatched a plan. Shelton wrote up a lease agreement between himself and his mother designating Shelton as the legal resident of the home.

He loaded some guns and his dog into his Jeep and set off for California, arriving at 4 a.m. to find cars in the driveway. Shelton said he parked down the street and waited until everyone left the house several hours later.

Shelton let himself in using the keys to the house. Video shows a bed and other furniture sitting inside the home as well as boxes of belongings and what appears to be a California Department of Corrections uniform.

Shelton said he started installing security cameras when two women pulled up to the house.

"I'm really sorry about all this," one of the women can be heard saying in a video Shelton recorded. "It's a nightmare and beyond."

Shelton told the woman that if she didn't have everything out by midnight, he'd have it hauled away. The alleged squatters missed the deadline, but were gone by three, Shelton said.

[FLT-bird]

I would think from a legal standpoint, if the state is collecting tax payments on a property, that is considered admission by the state as to who has the legal rights to that property.

In some states, you are correct wrt adverse possession. There are several conditions that have to be satisfied to make an adverse possession claim and one of those is "adverse and hostile"....meaning the person making the claim has to claim that they alone own the property and nobody else does. Some states by law make it impossible to satisfy the hostility requirement unless you pay property tax on the property in question. That usually does not hold for prescriptive easements however. That's not a dispute over ownership of the property - only the right to use said property for some specific purpose.

[1FreeAmerican]

GMTA!

[Georgia Girl 2]

I wouldn’t get the cops involved because then you’re stuck with the courts. We would be escorting them out at gunpoint. End of problem. But this is Georgia. 😆

[GOPJ]

:)

[Delta 21]

Thoroughly plow the drain pipe under in a tragic landscaping
accident and apologize profusely.

[dfwgator]

It’s all about driving out private landlords.