What ever happened to?

By Tracey McManus

Family who lost home still struggling

If there’s anything Hayward Hancock and Cindy Hooper have learned in the past year, it’s that home has nothing to do with a house.
They know now that roofs can be taken away and lost no matter how hard you fight.
When the Aiken couple got behind on payments and their mortgage company announced it would take their house in September 2010, they put all their belongings in a yard sale to raise money to save it.
Despite the $6,000 they were able to send in, Hooper stood in the yard in her pajamas three months later and watched a repo company haul her double-wide mobile home away.
A year after becoming one of the thousands of victims to the foreclosure crisis, Hancock and Hooper are still not where they’d like to be.
They have a temporary trailer home and are working to find jobs, but are still searching for security.
“At least we still got each other,” Hooper said. “You feel like you want to cry your eyeballs out, but we’ve been through so much already. It can only get better, I guess.”
The couple was able to avoid homelessness by staying with Hancock’s brother in Aiken. Because his family owned the land where the double-wide sat, Hancock knew it was just a matter of earning enough money to get another trailer to put there.
In March, he was able to buy a 36-by-9-foot trailer, barely enough space for him and his wife.
What can’t fit inside is strewn across the yard, in the same places in the grass from the day in December when they had to get all their things out of the house. Books, clothes, dishes, furniture, are all covered in tarps and plastic, trying to stay preserved for the day they can get a real house back.
“It’s been a rough year,” Hancock said.
To make it easier, the couple’s grown son Jeff is living with a relative, and their daughter stays with her biological mother in Florence, visiting on the weekends.
Another blow to the family came in June, when Hancock lost his job at the furniture store he was managing in Aiken.
Since then, he has applied at fast food restaurants, moving companies, a recycling plant – “everywhere,” he said.
“No one is hiring, or they say they are hiring from within or they’ll call you back,” Hancock said.
Hancock sells scrap metal where he can and collects cans to trade for cash.
Hooper got a job at Nette’s Flea Market in Graniteville, where she continues to sell sentimental belongings for money to get by.
Despite their struggles, their strength has not gone unnoticed.
Robert Wise said his friends still have the heart to help others.
“They heard my daughter was going through some money problems, so when they went to eat at her restaurant, they left her a big tip, even when they didn’t have anything,” Wise said. “It was much more than they had to do. A lot of people in their situation would throw their hands up, a lot of people would go to stealing, but they kept the faith.”
The secret, Hancock said, is not giving up the fight.
He is still searching for a lawyer who will take on his case, which he said was a botched and illegal foreclosure.
When their lender, 21st Century Mortgage of Knoxville, Tenn., told the family the house would be foreclosed upon, no representative could tell the couple how much money they owed, they said. The bank wouldn’t comment when a reporter asked about the situation.
Two years before, the couple turned to Apply 2 Save loan modification for help and paid the company $14,000 to secure their home in Aiken County through July 2010.
But Apply 2 Save never gave a penny to the mortgage company. Now bankrupt, Apply 2 Save was one of 16 marketers the Federal Trade Commission brought lawsuits against that “charged consumers up-front fees and made false promises that they could get their loans modified or prevent foreclosure,” according to an FTC report.
On days they both want to give up, they remember that home is wherever they have each other.
The couple met as teenagers and dated through high school. They parted ways soon after when Hancock left for the Navy. He married twice and divorced. Hooper went to work managing a restaurant after high school, married, divorced and never thought she’d see Hancock again.
Fourteen years after they last saw each other in high school, Hancock drove from Florence, S.C., to visit his brother in Aiken. The brothers went to Domino’s for a pizza, and there Hooper was behind the counter.
On Wednesday the couple celebrated their 12th anniversary of being back together.
Although they wouldn’t have their house for their anniversary, they both said they felt at home.