Woman, 88, Faces Eviction After Foreclosure

Fannie Mae proceeded with its plans to evict an 88-year-old tenant with Alzheimer’s, congestive heart failure, and limited mobility from her longtime West River home, which she lost to foreclosure last year after signing a reverse mortgage at the height of the housing bubble.

Jennifer Jason, a Hartford-based attorney representing the Federal National Mortgage Association, also known as Fannie Mae, argued on behalf of that eviction Tuesday morning in housing court on the third floor of the state Superior Court building at 121 Elm St.

The defendant in the case is Cora Winn, an 88-year-old woman who has lived at 24 Vine St. in West River since 1973, when she and her husband Bill Winn, Sr. first bought the three-family house.

Cora Winn wasn’t in housing court Tuesday to plead her case before Superior Court Judge Claudia Baio.

Instead, her attorney Joe Rini and her son Bill Winn, Jr. were present on her behalf. They explained that Winn has spent most of the past six months in out of the hospital for a variety of longstanding health issues, including Alzheimer’s, dementia, and, according to Rini, having a heart working at only 20 percent capacity.

“We haven’t been able to get her out of the house because of these issues,” Rini said. ​“Essentially, this is a humanitarian request.”

That ​“humanitarian request,” Rini elaborated, is that the court grant Winn another six weeks to find a new place to live.

He said that he and her son have submitted housing applications to the Fair Haven Heights senior apartment complex Bella Vista and to the Housing Authority of New Haven, and are working with city social service agencies and even with U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s office to try to find some kind of financial support for accessible, affordable housing.

Rini, who said he started working on Winn’s case just last week, said he expects the family will need another 30 days to secure housing for the defendant, and then another two weeks on top of that to actually move her out of Vine Street.

“This is not somebody who’s trying to beat the court,” Rini said. Winn simply has so many health and mobility and financial issues that she has nowhere else to go if the eviction goes forward. ​“She can’t live in the ambulance,” he said. ​“I don’t know where they’re going to take her.”

Jason said she sympathizes with Winn’s health issues. But, she argued, Winn and her family have had ample time to find her a new home. ​“They’ve had a significant amount of time to make arrangements and plan for this.”

According to online state court records, Winn’s eviction case has lasted nearly a year, and her serious medical conditions much longer than that.

In the initial eviction complaint, Jason wrote that CIT Bank purchased 24 Vine St. in July 9, 2018 at a foreclosure sale. The bank then quit ownership of the property to Fannie Mae later that same month. Fannie Mae is a federal government-sponsored enterprise that buys mortgages from banks with the goal of expanding the secondary mortgage market.

Over four months later, in January 2019, Fannie Mae’s attorney filed an eviction lawsuit against Winn and several other family members who were still living in the house even after the bank had taken ownership.

Jason wrote in that initial complaint that Fannie Mae first provided the tenants in August 2019 with information about their rights under the Federal Protecting Tenant At Foreclosure Act of 2009, as well as several months between the foreclosure and the summary process lawsuit.

In a Jan. 17, 2019 court-filed response to the eviction lawsuit, Bill Winn, Jr. wrote opposed the eviction by arguing that his mother had been the victim of predatory lending.

“The foreclosure was a result of the reverse mortgage company committing fraud,” he wrote.

His father, he said, and the mortgage company convinced his mother to sign a $345,000 reverse mortgage in 2005 as issued by the Atlanta, Georgia-based Financial Freedom Senior Funding Corporation.

Even at that time, Winn, Jr. wrote, his mother had a ​“mental disability,” leaving her mentally ill-equipped to sign such a document.

After Tuesday’s court hearing, Winn, Jr. told the Independent that his mom thought at the time that she was signing divorce papers, not a reverse mortgage that would saddle her with debt after her husband’s death. Reverse mortgages provide homeowners with loans based on the future equity of their home, with the entire loan balance becoming due after a borrower dies, moves away permanently, or sells the home.

According to the court record, Superior Court Judge John Cordani, who was the city’s housing court judge until September, ruled in March 2019 in favor of Fannie Mae. However, he set a final stay of execution for the eviction for Aug. 31, 2019, granting Winn and her family a five-month reprieve to find a new place to live.

On Sept. 3, Jason filed for a summary process execution for possession for Fannie Mae, indicating that Winn was still living at 24 Vine even past the Aug. 31 court-ordered deadline.

Then, on Sept. 26, the day before the state judicial marshal was scheduled to actually remove Winn and her belongings from the home, Rini and Winn’s son filed a motion to quash the eviction order in which they argued that Winn is in such poor health and needs a few more weeks to find a new place to live.

That motion to quash the eviction execution was what brought the two parties before Judge Baio Tuesday morning.

Jason, in her closing argument to Baio at the end of the 10-minute hearing, said that, even if the judge allows Fannie Mae to proceed with the eviction, Winn will in reality have at least two or three more weeks to find a home.

As evidenced by the Sept. 3 eviction execution notice and the Sept. 27 actual move-out date scheduled by the state judicial marshal, she said, marshals generally need at least a few weeks to schedule a final date and time to execute the order. Procedurally speaking, she said, Fannie Mae has to now rescind its Sept. 3 order and recognize it as unfilled, and then file for a new one, restarting that two or three-week clock before the marshal will actually show up once again at Winn’s door.

“I recognize that this one requires an immediate response,” Baio said. She promised to issue a decision within the next day or two.

On the courthouse steps after Tuesday’s hearing, Winn, Jr. (who declined to be photographed), a naturopath, herbalist, and Reiki healer, said he grew up in the Vine Street house, but now lives with his son on Olive Street. He said he has been researching the history of reverse mortgages and the role they played in the 2008 financial crisis ever since he first learned from his aunt in 2014 that his mother had signed one a decade ago. He said he is working on filing a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the mortgage company committed predatory lending against his mom.

“It was predatory lending,” he said. ​“Right off the rip.”