Lender Gives Up On Foreclosure, Discharges Mortgage, Cancels Debt, Hands Florida Man Free & Clear Title To Home

In Jacksonvile, Florida, The Florida Times Union reports:

• Perry Laspina was in the middle of foreclosure with the possibility of losing the house he owned in Jacksonville. Then the mail came one day in late January telling him that the house was his. Despite the $72,000 mortgage that he barely paid anything on, despite the foreclosure ... the house was his.
• In the middle of foreclosures gone wild, of a system overloaded by sheer volume, judicial investigations and allegations of corners cut, Laspina ended up with the house. Despite the fact that he didn't have an attorney in the foreclosure proceedings, the mortgage holder simply gave up and walked away. "I've never seen anything like this in my life," he said.
• It's a tale populated with many of the major players in the national foreclosure drama: The law firm of David Stern, the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (better known as MERS) and a mortgage packaged with others and sold into a securitized trust.

For how it happened, see Bank gives man foreclosed house for free.