An Oregon woman and her Navy vet husband are distraught after they managed to evict squatters who trashed their Maryland investment property – only for the housebreakers to move back in and laugh at attempts to change the locks.
Carol Park, 51, and her husband Sean, 49, were first alerted to a squatter in their property last July when they were called and asked who was mowing their lawn.
Using the courts to secure an eviction notice, eight months later in March the squatters were finally removed. But after just one day the brazen housebreakers returned, Carol Park told Fox News Digital.
They were heard boasting to a police officer at the time that the locksmith hadn’t done a good job changing the locks, and within a few days they began dismantling the property’s electricity meter.
The entire affair cost them a legitimate rental contract worth $90,000, and mortgage payments that continued despite the circumstances ‘tanked’ their bank account, Carol said.
Although last month the squatters were evicted for a second time, the couple are now in the process of rewiring the house and preparing it for an actual tenancy.
An Oregon woman and her husband were able to evict squatters in their home after eight months, only for them to return the next day. Pictured is the interior of the Maryland house after the squatters were finally evicted
Carol Park, 51, said the whole ordeal cost her and her husband a $90,000 rental contract
Sean and Carol Park own the investment property in Maryland but are trying to run a sheep farm in Oregon. Pictured is the house that was occupied
Carol and Sean live in Oregon, where they recently started a sheep farm. Sean served in the US Navy Reserve for nearly 24 years and retired in 2017.
‘Obviously this has been a tremendously scarring experience’ Carol told Fox News Digital. ‘Every time I talk about it, it just kind of rips open those wounds again.’
Carol described how the situation upended their lives. Sean was forced into working 12-hour days as a trucker, and she was working full-time and using her breaks to resolve the problem.
‘It could be your story tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We have lost a $90,000 rental contract and thousands of dollars of expenses on this property due to this squatter situation.’
Park said the saga began last July when she got a call from a property manager asking if she had hired somebody to mow the lawn as there was a mysterious person at the property.
When the property manager and a police officer confronted the man at the house, he said he had been provided a lease by a nearby homeless shelter. Nonetheless, he was asked to leave by the weekend.
The weekend came and he refused – he told Park he would only leave if he was ‘reimbursed’ $4,500 for the lease, which she told Fox News Digital constitutes extortion.
After months of bureaucracy involving the courts, they finally acquired an eviction notice for the squatter, but it would take until March to come into effect.
Even once an arrest warrant was signed, Parks was told by her lawyer the sheriff’s office had to wait until the ‘weather was right’ to carry out the eviction.
Once the locks were changed and the squatter was eventually removed, Carol arranged for the various belongings left behind to be removed by a junk hauler, who notified her that squatters had entered the property once again.
Carol arranged for the various belongings left behind to be removed by a junk hauler, who said when he arrived the squatters had simply returned. Pictured is the inside of the house
Within a few days of the squatters returning to the house they began dismantling the property’s electricity meter on the side of the house
When police attended the property hours later they were told yet again by the squatters that they had been given a lease.
She said the junk hauler heard them listening to music in their car on the driveway and boasting to a police officer that the locksmith who changed the locks hadn’t done a very good job.
Park says the police told her that her paperwork wasn’t satisfactory to evict them and that again she was going to have to go to court to get rid of them.
She said that after contacting all available law enforcement agencies she was told that even though an eviction notice had been served a day prior they would be unable to remove the squatters.
In the next days as they remained in the house, they disconnected the property’s electricity meter.
‘We had to pay for the electrician to get the power meter reinstated which was thousands of dollars and now we’re discovering,’ Park told Fox News Digital.
‘It’s an old house, that the siding is ripping off underneath where the power meter is and so now we’re going to have to replace a piece of siding and probably have re-do the electrical,’ she added.
‘We have had to forego many niceties and luxuries, despite working long hours, and have had to indefinitely postpone a business start-up and much-needed improvements in our own residence,’ Park said.
‘We live a modest life and this situation affects us and our children and our farm in Oregon. It also affects our neighbors in Maryland, who are forced to live next to criminals and sordid squatters because no one cares.’
