R.I. Foreclosure Eviction Violates Tenants' Rights

When is a foreclosure eviction not an eviction? Easy answer: When the person you're trying to evict doesn't live there. Angela Martinez of Providence, R.I., was helping her 20-year-old autistic son get ready to leave the home one April morning when there was a knock at the door. Movers barged in with packing boxes and began tossing her possessions into cardboard containers.

Although a constable held an eviction notice in his hand with the right to move out the owner, Martinez is not the owner; neither is her 21-year-old daughter, Stephanie Rodriguez, who lives there with her newborn daughter, Audrey; the baby's father; and her 16-year-old son, Franklin. The Martinez family rents the place for $900 per month from an absentee landlord who lives in New York. That landlord, Pedro Pena, was the one named on the eviction notice.

"It was illegal and they had no standing to do it," the family's lawyer, George Babcock, told AOL Real Estate about the eviction attempt. "It was immoral."