Florida Couple, Adult Children Get Jail In Connection With Scheme To Avoid Home Foreclosure

In Clay County, Florida, My Clay Sun reports:

• An Orange Park couple and their adult children were sent to Clay County jail following a scheme to avoid foreclosure on their $1 million Orange Park riverfront home. In April 1996, Andrew and Ruth Crawford and their children, James and Kelli Patterson, bought a 5-bedroom, 7-bathroom home [...] but made only a few mortgage payments. To avoid foreclosure, they refinanced the home several times and filed Chapter 13 bankruptcy more than a dozen times.

• [A]ttorneys for [the mortgage lender] convinced a judge to dismiss the [most recent] bankruptcy and to ban them from filing bankruptcy yet again. Then Kelli Patterson, on three occasions, sent a phony fax from her workplace to the Clay Today newspaper to stop legal advertisements announcing the public sale of the home. Her faxes contained a forged signature of [the lender's] attorney.

For the story, see 4 jailed in foreclosure of Clay home.

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