Members demonstrate outside a South Gate home facing eviction threat
A South Gate family is facing eviction after the mother got cancer and they fell behind on their mortgage payments. They can make the payments now, but the bank won't take their money.
In Southern California, members of the Occupy LA movement headed to South Gate on Tuesday to try to help a homeowner stave off foreclosure.
It was part of a National Day of Action, coordinated by community groups such as "Refund California" and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.
Several dozen demonstrators showed up at the home of Ana Casas Wilson, who is trying to save the place she has lived in since 1975.
"A lady comes to the door saying our house is for sale and I'm in the hospital because I got sick from the cancer," said Casas Wilson, who is fighting breast cancer.
That, she said, is how she learned the bank was going after her family home.
The family has received an eviction notice for the home where she lives with her husband, James Wilson, their 17-year-old son and her mother, Rebecca Casas.
The family refinanced the small house in 1990 in order to make repairs, and fell behind in making payments when Ana Casas Wilson was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer.
"A bank comes and tells us to get out? It's not right," said her mother, Rececca Casas.
"We were fine up until I got cancer," Ana Casas Wilson explained.
She has been an activist for the disabled since she has lived with cerebral palsy all her life, but it is the cancer diagnosis, two years ago, that has disrupted her life and her family's income, and put them in peril of losing their home.
"When she got the cancer, I had to let one job go to help her," said husband James Wilson.
He took a year's leave of absence when his wife underwent cancer surgery. The Wilsons said they were misled by a company promising to handle a loan modification for them. Now that they can make the mortgage payments once again, they said the lender told them it is not interested.
"They said no. They don't even want to talk to us at all," said Casas Wilson, adding the bank claimed it already gave the family a modification. But she said she knew nothing about this.
What will she do if the sheriff shows up with an eviction notice?
"I don't care, I'm not leaving," she said.
The lender, in this case, was Wells Fargo and a spokesperson said the bank was aware of the issues and claimed it was willing to work out these kinds of problems, but it would not comment on this specific case.
A similar demonstration took place at a home in Riverside on Tuesday.
About 50 people showed up to move an evicted resident back into a property that he lost to foreclosure, which he blamed on a bank's refusal to negotiate with him on a modified mortgage.
"I don't know if this is gonna work," said Art de los Santos, a 46-year-old metal worker and former U.S. Marine who was kicked out of the single-story house in July.
"If I get arrested, it's still worth it. I'm trying to get their attention," he told City News Service.
"I'm willing to back him up," said Occupy LA's Joseph McCoy. "This is happening all over the country. People are tired of getting pushed around."
McCoy was among the roughly four dozen people bused in for the reoccupation demonstration in Riverside. Some planned to remain, camped out on the front lawn.
"The most important thing is getting people to think," McCoy said.
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