-By Warner Todd Huston
If you haven’t paid your bills there is expectation that you can lose everything, of course. But what if you are not behind in your bills, but a bank that isn’t your bank breaks into your house, hauls away your belongings, changes your locks, all claiming you owe them money? And what happens when the bank realizes it got the wrong house? Worse, how would you feel if the bank refuses to pay you back for its destruction of all your belongings?
Well, that is what happened to an Ohio woman.
Katie Barnett of Athens County, Ohio, came home one day to find that her key wouldn’t work in her front door lock. She was able to shinny her way into her home through a window, but what she found inside shocked her.
Her home had been emptied of nearly every possession.
Barnett immediately went to her local police force and reported the incident. But after a week passed, the police declared the case closed.
McArthur Police told the woman that it was a bank that had foreclosed on her home and took all her belongings to pay what she supposedly owed.
But, the bank, the First National Bank in Wellston, had meant to repossess the home across the street from Barnett but the repo company the bank hired to do the job got the wrong house.
Barnett went to the bank and demanded she be repaid for the loss of all her belongings. The bank, however, is refusing to deal with her. Barnett says that the bank won’t pay her “retail price” for her belongings.
“I’ not running a yard sale,” she said. “I didn’t invite them into my home as ask them to make me an offer.” She noted.
Meanwhile, everything Barnett owned is gone. All of it.
Now she is angry.
“Now, I’m just angry,” Barnett told central Ohio’s 10TV News. “It wouldn’t be a big deal if they would step up and say ‘I’m sorry, we will replace your stuff.’ Instead, I’m getting attitude from them. They’re sarcastic when they talk to me. They make it sound like I’m trying to rip the bank off. All I want is my stuff back.”
Are “the powers that be” getting out of hand with their arrogance in this country?
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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