Legal Question in Landlord & Tenant Law in New Jersey

Four years ago, after our father�s death, our brother and I had decided to sell the family house. Our sister gave us hell over the idea not wanting to see �the last house mom and dad had before they died sold and possibly torn down�. Then she came up with the idea of switching houses. Her husband, she and her two kids would move into our parents house, and we into theirs. We didn�t want to move into Keansburg due to it�s depressed economy and the lack of work, but after dealing with her temper tantrums, fits of crying and hysteria over the phone, we gave in and switched houses. From the very beginning, because my brother wasn�t working, she had him travel the 120 mile round trip to Allendale to help raise her kids. Bear in mind, he was constantly going between Keansburg and Allendale at least once a week sometimes spending days with her because her husband would go away on his boat for business and she was afraid to be by herself. He felt sorry for her. However, now that he has a full-time job, he can't spend every day babysitting. He works at one of the TD Banks and I work in NYC and also have a full time job.

The original deal was if we didn�t like living there, we could tell them, they would put the house on the market, sell it for us and we would collect the proceedings from the sale. After the first year we told them we wanted to move, but our sister wouldn�t have it. We argued all the time. Finally she threatened that if we didn�t get a mortgage on the house, she would evict us. Now neither our brother nor I had the money to go anywhere else and our credit scores weren�t exactly in the range that we would be approved.

Our sister insisted on using our next door neighbor Gail Pace, since she did mortgages and she would be able to get us approved once again threatening if we went to a bank, she would evict us. We spoke with Gail who worked for United Mortgage in NJ at the time (she has since been fired) and she agreed to help us. We set up an agreement that when we would take out a mortgage and be getting back a �gift of equity� as Gail called it so we could pay off credit cards. She had us sign the original papers without letting us read them(we did this from her home and she claimed to be feeling sick) then she had us make the check for the appraisal company out to her and she would make it out to the company. She claimed she knew what she was doing and had been doing so for 37 years. I tried to talk to our sister about it and she threatened if we screwed up the deal she would evict us.

We waited three months for the appraisal to happen, or possibly happen, We never saw or got a copy of the appraisal report or even a business card from the appraiser. Gail kept it all. Any time I asked her for copies of the paperwork, she kept pushing us off saying she would give it to us at the closing. We never got copies of any paperwork and any checks that we had to have made out Gail insisted on making them out to her instead of an appraisal or title company. She refused to give us the names of these companies so we were never able to speak to anyone. I started talking to other people and they were saying something was not right about the way Gail was conducting business. I tried to tell our sister this but she kept saying if we screwed it up, she would have us evicted. Talking to my brother in law didn�t get us any further.

About a year ago, we had a big argument over us not wanting to get the mortgage but to have them sell the house. Our brother and I by that time had used up $33 thousand dollars from our father�s estate paying rent and bills and we wanted out. She went completely nuts on us, saying she was not letting us out of the deal. She also cut us off from our niece and nephew saying if we tried to contact them ever again, she would lie to the authorities and tell them that we were playing sex games with her kids and she would teach the kids, especially our niece Cassandra, what to say to make a judge believe that we were really hurting them. Our nephew Gage is slightly autistic with a speech problem so she knows he wouldn�t be able to follow her lies.

One night in April, after traveling 120 miles in a rainstorm to deliver a rent check to them, Her husband called NJ Central and had them shut off our lights which we had to pay to get turned back on.

She started holding our utility bills which went to their house instead of ours. She refused to turn them over to us for months until it got to the point where we couldn't pay them. We had to take from the rent to keep the water and the electricity on. We were constantly calling the utility companies to try and find out what we owed them. We were unable to get the bills put in our names because we were only renters and many times without the payment stubs, the companies were giving us a hard time about putting the payments through because they needed the stubs for their records. This was a stupid move on our former brother's-in-law part, because they kept the bills in his name, and any delinquent payments would affect his credit score. Because of her actions, we spent the last three months living in the house without running water. We were either buying bottled water or my brother was taking empty plastic bottles to the bank and filling them up.

The house itself had many problems, a gas stove that didn�t always light, plumbing problems, a roof that leaked and mice. On several occasions, I tried to talk to my brother in law about going halves on an exterminator. I know how expensive they can be and I know he�s not made of money. But on both occasions his response was �It�s YOUR house, YOU deal with it� It was always our house when there were problems but it was their house if they wanted something. Around the end of June, I found a stray kitten on my way to work who rid the house of mice in a week. We had discussed getting a cat previously but since both my brother in law and nephew were allergic, we held off. When opportunity presented itself I took it.

Our sister also would call the bank where my brother works to harass him there and tried on a number of occasions to get him fired by constantly calling the bank to tie up the phone lines so she could scream at my brother. The head teller at that time wouldn�t let her tie up the phone and told her if she continued, he would call the police.

We finally got word that the mortgage had come through and our sister insisted that we sign over our share of our father�s house in exchange for the equity check and us getting the house in Keansburg. We didn�t agree with this and her response was �Sign the paper or Gerard (our brother in law) wouldn�t sign the house over to us. Gail said it would be ok and we, like a couple of idiots, signed the paper.

When the closing day finally came, our former sister called and cancelled it, saying that she would not go through with it until we signed a paper agreeing never to contact her children again. It was strictly to get her kids to hate us by saying the we hated them and didn�t want to see them again and she had the paperwork to prove them. But her husband supposedly wanted to go through with it so he could get the house off of his back, so we started putting more money into the deal to get it going again. At one point Gail said we could transfer the mortgage from the house we were going to purchase to another house. We gave her an additional $500 to do so which fell through when the place we wanted turned out to be a condemned property. All that was selling was the land.

Then last June, our brother in law tried to break into the house by ripping out the back of my brother�s air conditioner (his room was on the ground floor - our sister's idea) I called the cops. We have police reports of their harassment that also went on that year as well as a cassette tape of our sister�s threatening phone calls.

Long story short: they took us to court in July and we were evicted in the middle of August. On the day he took us to court, he admitted to having a cassette tape of a phone conversation between him and Gail where she admitted that there was never going to be a closing. He said she was a fraud and he had the proof. We do have the tape though we haven�t been able to listen to it due to not having a decent enough tape recorder. It�s the only real proof we have and we don�t want it destroyed by a tape recorder that chews tapes. We also have a signed letter from our brother in law stating that Gail owes us $1400. The conversation was recorded Feb. 2009. Our brother-in-law NEVER mentioned ANYTHING to us all that time and didn�t send us the tape until two days before evicting us on August 14th.

The woman who was helping us with the mortgage didn't come to court as our witness, so the judge said that if we didn't have the rent it was our fault. Now this woman has stopped returning our calls, probably because we were supposed to get $1900 back that we put into the closing. We think that (since she lost her house) she took our check and used it to pay her rent - as far as I know, she has been unemployed for over a year. We are in the process of taking legal action. We should have done that when this whole mortgage mess started, but we were holding on to the hope that after everything was said and done, our former sister would become normal again. Yes, we were very stupid.

Also during this time, I had been trying to sell my father�s 2000 Ford Explorer. Right before he went into the hospital for the last time, he had missed two payments and the bank was going to repossess the truck. I took over the payments for him by removing money from my 401k. After he died, I bought the truck from the estate for $6100 from my inheritance. I gave the bank $1800 from my 401K. I found out very quickly, I was unable to see over the hood so instead of trying to drive like this, I wanted to sell it to some friends. My sister threw a fit because she didn�t want me to sell dad�s truck to �spics� (my friends are of Spanish decent and was willing to pay me full price) She was also upset because one of my aunts wanted to buy it from me for $3000 less than I was asking and I wouldn�t sell. Finally she said she and her husband would buy it from me. At that point I said ok even knocking off $1000. Willing to sell it to them for $6000, rather than $7000. I was paying the insurance on the truck so they could drive it and we once I sold it to them, I was going to cancel the insurance (trying to be nice and help out family) I found out, through Gail, that either my sister or her husband forged my name on the title so they wouldn�t have to pay me for the car. They also got insurance on it which my sister admitted to having.

We have been living in a motel since we were evicted. As yet, we do not have the money for security, and almost all of our paychecks are going for room and storage. We've been living on non-perishables like Ramen soup and cereal, because the only refrigerator we have is a mini-bar fridge that doesn't hold a lot. As a result of this bad diet, my brother was hospitalized during the week before Christmas because he turned diabetic.

We�ve been sharing the room along with the cat. We're paying as much in rent as we were paying for the entire house in Keansburg so we have been unable to put any money aside to get another place. I�ve been looking for a second job since this started but between the rotten economy and having to be at a bus by 12:30am or I�m stuck in NYC all night, not to mention not being able to leave a day job before 6pm ( my hours are 10am -6pm no exceptions) it�s not easy.

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