Note: This post is a
part of a series detailing my family's fight with dementia and elder abuse.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I do not even claim that anything in this story is accurate, legal or illegal. If you are attempting a DIY eviction, start with the legal self-help office. Most courts in larger systems have them. They can help you double-check your forms and make sure you're talking to the right people. If you have the means, consider hiring a company to do the eviction for you. The time spent waiting in line alone can be worth it, and any missteps are covered by the agreement.
If your grandfather has elected, in his dementia, to allow people of questionable character to live at his house, and, through a process of cajoling, begging, and pleading, they have refused to leave, it may be possible to avail yourself of the tortuous eviction process in your locale to unseat them from the house provided a) your grandfather agrees to sign the paperwork if you do not have Power of Attorney or b) you are able to obtain Power of Attorney and sign it yourself, but you would certainly be advised to avoid sparring with the legal eagle sovereign citizen types inhabiting the house and asking a third party professional to do it because they won't miss some minutia that cause months of delay, and, if you attempt the eviction on your own anyway, doing all the paperwork yourself, then it is possible to evict someone with the help of your local constable, nor should you be surprised, should your grandfather let them back onto the property in his dementia because he is being both stubborn and suggestable, to have to do the exact same process all over again (maybe twice if you screw up the paperwork in some small but easy to miss way again) to unseat them finally once you've been able to get him extricated from their influence and off the property.
By the summer of 2017, my brother and I had trespassed people from our family home only to have it reoccupied by those same strangers. The triumph in 2015 was turned around only a few months afterwards as they were invited back in and established themselves even more firmly. My grandfather provided various explanations (short-term charity, a favor to an old coworker, or a companion to help him from getting bored), but we could not influence him to send them away again. None of it made sense to us, and we were left to wonder if he was sick, in debt, being blackmailed, involved in prostitution, a drug addict, etc. His memory and recall were growing worse, but we didn't have any inkling of what dementia was nor who we should turn to. Our arguments about his safety grew more frequent, and on occasion he was able to be reasoned with.
The thing that shook him loose were discoveries that he had been the victim of check fraud multiple times, and he had finally become financially unstable. Some names that appeared on fraud notices, forged checks not in his handwriting, and ETFs on his bank account for utilities at other addresses include Quasheen Laster, Zakeyaha Amacker, S Jones, Zanay Pruitt, Tangela Reliford, Zaysia Chess, and others. We prevailed upon him to start eviction proceedings early in the summer of 2017.
Evictions are a touchy subject. Tenants say Landlords use them to terrorize tenants with short notice and for facile reasons. Tenants fear the black mark on their credit or being tossed out into the summer heat, and the process evokes images of your belongings piled on the side of the road. Stories about squatters in Vegas that abuse hearings and appeals, dragging their occupancy for months, circulate in media and parlor conversation. But what do you do if your grandfather casually invites people to stay with him in his dementia? What recourse do you have to make a suggestable man carry through with a month-long process that is a struggle at the best of times? Who are these people that won't leave your family home anyway? Can you trust the law to act, and how will these people respond to having a case brought against them? This uncertainty weighed on us as we started researching the process.
We chose an eviction as opposed to another trespass because we wanted to be sure the people taking advantage of my grandfather could be removed from the property without recourse. They were living at the house for months. They had taken control of the upstairs, the closets, the kitchen, and every other surface of the house. Any question that they had been living there for an extended period of time would be met with the law stonewalling us. A trespass could become he said/she said, and there was no guarantee that officers could be prevailed upon to enforce it again. Even though they were not ejected immediately, the eviction could be weilded by us should they return.
