Posted on 12/13/2017 2:09:15 PM PST by Coleus
A man who swiped an elderly woman’s house with phony documents did time for the crime — but an appellate court is letting the city off the hook for processing the paperwork that let the ex-con make himself at home. A Brooklyn appeals court has ruled that a judge was right to toss a lawsuit brought against the city by Jennifer Merin — whose Queens abode was filched by a criminal who filed a fraudulent deed. Merin, 74, had sued the city for not catching the forgery when the paperwork was first filed, but lost on appeal when the court backed a judge who said she couldn’t prove the city was negligent.
The feisty homeowner is fuming and has vowed to fight the decision. “I find it absolutely astonishing and sickening that the city that gave away my property without due process by registering an obviously fraudulent deed, while it was still charging me for taxes on that property and water usage on that property, is now insisting that it has no accountability for those actions,” Merin told the Daily News. The city said Merin was suing over a missed “needle in a haystack,” according to court papers. The phony deed that started all the problems was one of almost 1,400 deeds recorded that week, city lawyers noted.
Merin “was the victim of a crime none of us would want to experience but the law is clear, the city was not liable,” Law Department spokesman Nick Paolucci said, emphasizing that the city has bulked up safeguards to address deed fraud. Merin, a Manhattan resident, inherited the Tudor style house after her mother died. The Laurelton home has been in her family since it was built in 1930. She stored heirlooms and belongings there, and sometimes slept there as well. But in March 2014, Darrell Beatty filed a transfer report with the city. He’d moved into Merin’s place a month earlier without her knowledge. Beatty’s dubious deed transfer stated a woman named Edith Moore sold him the property for $0 a year earlier. But the filings had all sorts of issues that were easy to spot, like the fact there was no Edith Moore and there no mention of Merin, her lawyers said.
“Without the city’s approval, Beatty’s deed would have been nothing more than a piece of paper,” they wrote. Merin got wise to the uninvited inhabitant several months later when she saw a spike in her water bill. It took years of legal battles to get Beatty out and have Merin declared the owner. Beatty, 52, pleaded guilty to criminal possession of a forged instrument. He was sentenced in September 2016 to a year behind bars. Meanwhile, Merin sued the city for negligence and a violation of her civil rights. But a Queens judge and most recently the borough’s appellate court both ruled that Merin’s arguments didn’t prove city liability. The experience has embittered the homeowner, who still has to repair damages left by the squatter.
Beatty, who moved in with his sons, Darrell Kash Beatty, 25, and DeShaun Beatty, 22, also threw out or disposed of most of Merin’s family heirlooms, she said.
“Victims apparently have no rights at all,” Merin said. “And the court’s insistence that I have no right to sue just digs deeper in uprooting my faith in the system.”
And how many were phony?........................
Yet somehow they city is able to find, out of all the millions of returns, the people who filed their taxes wrong.
They are pretty sure that it’s not THAT many.
There have been cases of banks (BankAmerica for one) that made out phony deeds on houses that were paid for and not even mortgaged through them.
Din’t do nuffin.
Where does a Deed mean a damned thing anymore ? Title has replaced Deed.
Forging a Deed. That’s something Snidely Whiplash would do.
Okay, they ginned up a false title to the house and tried to take it.
I actually agree with this decision. As much as the woman went through - and I feel sorry for her - NYC wasn’t liable for another’s criminal act.
This is a purely administrative function - someone presents a (notarized) deed, the clerk takes some money, and then files the deed. Happens all the time, EVERYWHERE in this country. The filing entities are not responsible to investigate the veracity of every word on every piece of paper that is filed - else the entire system would collapse because nothing was getting done.
Thanks Coleus. And the city kept charging her for water/sewer and property taxes? If she can't get satisfaction in court, she should go wild, because when there's no more recourse to law, all that remains is recourse to lawlesness.
When someone commits this type of crime against you you just need to take what you’d spend on lawyers and just dispose of the perp.
Absolutely right. The take-away from this story is that no Federal, State or local bureaucracy is going to acknowledge, let alone rectify, incompetence that led to some innocent person’s loss.
She would have been ahead of the game if the criminals simply disappeared and she filed another fake deed to return the property to herself.
The Grant Deed is what title is based on. Filing an acceptance of the Grant Deed would go a long way to prevent this among other things.
I want to detect that yard.
Typical for corrupt NYC not to want to take responsibility for their actions. I understand there were several red flags on the paperwork, but the lazy shiftless clerk just rubber stamped them along anyway. Typical NYC clerk. I’ve had experiences down at the Bored of Ed in Brooklyn which illustrate this perfectly. I needed a clerk to look up a number for me, a matter of a few keystrokes on her computer. But she was eating some squares of watermelon out of a Tupperware container (it was nowhere near lunchtime) and did not deign to fulfill my request until she was completely done with her watermelon, fixed her hair, etc. All the while, I was standing there waiting, my time being wasted. Nothing would happen to her for her rude and lazy behavior, you can be assured. So I really feel for this lady. Her home was illegally squatted in by some filthy lowlifes. Her valuable personal possessions were sold by said lowlifes and the home was wrecked. None of this would have happened if the clerk had had half a brain and a few molecules of ATP to power them to be thorough.
Typical for corrupt NYC not to want to take responsibility for their actions. I understand there were several red flags on the paperwork, but the lazy shiftless clerk just rubber stamped them along anyway. Typical NYC clerk. I’ve had experiences down at the Bored of Ed in Brooklyn which illustrate this perfectly. I needed a clerk to look up a number for me, a matter of a few keystrokes on her computer. But she was eating some squares of watermelon out of a Tupperware container (it was nowhere near lunchtime) and did not deign to fulfill my request until she was completely done with her watermelon, fixed her hair, etc. All the while, I was standing there waiting, my time being wasted. Nothing would happen to her for her rude and lazy behavior, you can be assured. So I really feel for this lady. Her home was illegally squatted in by some filthy lowlifes. Her valuable personal possessions were sold by said lowlifes and the home was wrecked. None of this would have happened if the clerk had had half a brain and a few molecules of ATP to power them to be thorough.
In some cities such corruption extends to connections between the buyers and agencies that put the properties up for sale/auction.
Look at it this way:
Someone pays the city with forged currency.
That same office hands you change (including forged currency) in a subsequent transaction, and you are telling me that the city would not be accountable for fraud???
Too easy on clerks.
It’s like the Islamoterrorists (or illegal immigrants) who obtain MULTIPLE drivers’ licenses from DPS offices with clerks knowing that the paperwork is fraudulent.
Such criminal rings in government offices are exposed now and again.
People on the take. Even judges.
It’s not just NYC government employees, it’s EVERY government employee at any level, city-county-state-province-canton-nation, in ANY GOVERNMENT on Earth. They are interchangeable. You could take a bureaucratic employee from Zaire, place them in the bureaucracy of Russia, Great Britain, United States or China and they would function just as well...............
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