Some community activists could face criminal charges after breaking into a home in Southeast Baltimore.
Police were at the home Thursday night looking for fingerprints and other evidence.
The activists who staged the break-in belong to the Association of Community Organizations For Reform Now or ACORN.
After snapping a lock with bolt cutters, ACORN member Louis Beverly told supporters "this is our house now."
... ACORN says that they will move Donna Hanks back in despite the fact that she no longer owns the house. During the taping of this story a man by the name of William Lane told ABC2 News that he owns the house currently--and plans to sue Acorn.
link...Donna Hanks' story is all about what went wrong in the housing boom - and a roadmap of how we got to where we are today. In 2001, Hanks sold her longtime house on Clinton Street and bought this row house flanking Patterson Park, for 87-thousand dollars -- cash. By March 2008, she had lost the house to foreclosure. Last fall, Hanks was evicted. Since then, the 56-year-old has lived in four different rentals.
Yesterday, ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, cut the lock on the South Ellwood Street property. Hanks stepped into the house for the first time since September 29th. ACORN officials say she'll live there after the house is made livable. It's ACORN's way to press for an immediate moratorium on foreclosures until the President's plan can get going, says community organizer Joseph Cox.
"The context for today is that we're still calling attention to all the people this plan is too late to help and also call attention to those folks whose houses are going up for auction today and tomorrow and next week and the week after, who are going to be too late to benefit from that plan."
Hanks, who works in hotel catering, refinanced the house several times since buying it to pay for renovations. She also had to pay medical bills, because she is uninsured. The last time around, in 2005, she responded to a flyer in the mail, and got a loan of nearly 250-thousand dollars. Wells Fargo, she says, subsequently bought the loan.
"When it came to a problem with work schedule, in the winter season dropped down for two months, I had to try to make an understanding with Wells Fargo, that that was the problem why I couldn't keep up the payments, and they didn't want to hear it. They wanted their money ASAP, regardless of what was going on."
In hindsight, she concedes, the loan was too much. But at the time, she figured the lender knew the numbers.
"To look back at it now, the house was not worth the amount of money that was given, but I took it upon that that was the going thing."
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linkWelcome to Zimbabwe.
