One ambitious thief has taken things a bit further than simply breaking and entering; he’s staying. A Manhattan woman claims an ex-con has stolen her home in Queens by filing a phony deed with the city and moving in.
Jennifer Merin is battling the thief in court to remove the convicted armed robber, Darrell Beatty and his sons from the three-bedroom Tudor, according to the New York Post.
“It just devastates me,” Merin, an online film critic, told the Post as she looked at her family heirlooms piled in the garage of the Laurelton home.
Merin said her Russian and Ukrainian grandparents moved into the house on 141st Avenue in 1931 and raised her mother and her mother’s two siblings there.
She first realized something was wrong when she received a pricey water bill. When she investigated, she found her locks changed and her car gone. The thieves told police that they were the legal residents.
“[This] case is what changed the dynamic in the Department of Finance of how we process deed transfers,” city Sheriff Joseph Fucito, whose office executes evictions and probes deed fraud, told The Post. [NYP] – Christopher Cameron