Pricey Northern Virginia Not Immune From Crime, Vandalism, Squatters Associated With Vacant Foreclosed Homes

The Washington Post reports:

• The growing foreclosure crisis has forced suburban law enforcement agencies to tackle a new challenge: policing empty houses. As evictions mount and many houses remain unsold for months, even years, vacant properties have become havens for squatters, vandals, thieves, partying teenagers and worse, officials said.

• In Springfield this winter, Fairfax County police found blood inside a vacant house and traced it to an injured sexual assault suspect who had been hiding there before he stole a car and fled. He was eventually caught in Maryland, police said. About the same time, a 27-year-old woman was arrested by Loudoun County sheriff's deputies after she, her husband and two children moved into a foreclosed house in Ashburn and allegedly tried to use forged documents to convince officers that she was the new owner, officials said. "These people even managed to get the electricity turned on in their names," said Sgt. Shelby Ruby, a Loudoun deputy. "That's some nerve, right there."

As far as vandalism at the homes is concerned, often caused by the foreclosed owners themselves, one local police official observed:

• "People are angry," Loudoun Sheriff Steve O. Simpson said. "And our deputies who go to these houses to serve evictions find that people have stripped their houses of toilets and stoves and refrigerators." At [one] property, deputies found that the hardwood floors also had been stripped.

For more, see As Foreclosed Homes Empty, Crime Arrives.

For a related story in Massachusetts on the trashing of foreclosed homes by their owners, see Boston Herald: Owners trash, strip their foreclosed homes (Fixtures, cabinets, tubs, sinks, even stairways face wrath of dispossessed).