KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The old adage is that the wheels of justice grind slowly, but in this case they are moving so slowly that an attorney worries that this could be the end for a woman whose home foreclosure he’s fighting and whose community roots go back decades.
Drusylda Towery holds up a photo of her father, sitting next to the flag the Air Force gave her after he was buried.
“He was one of the first black federal marshals,” Ms. Towery said. In fact Garland Louis Towery was the first African American to own property on Troostwood, a quiet residential street less than half a mile from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Her father refused to leave the home even as the neighborhood declined in the 1980s, when most of his neighbors pulled up roots and fled to the suburbs. When he died in 2010, his daughter Drusylda took over the family home and started making payments on the VA loan her father had taken out not long before he died.
“I never missed a payment,” she said.
Until, her attorney told FOX 4, she got a call from the then loan holder Bank of America, telling her to stop making payments while it investigated whether her father’s credit life insurance plan could be used to pay off the loan. By the time Ms. Towery learned there was no insurance money, she was nearly $35,000 behind on payments. Not long after that, Bank of America sold the loan to Nationstar, which started foreclosure proceedings.
Efforts by Ms. Towery’s Legal Aid Attorney, James Crump, to fight the foreclosure were getting nowhere until FOX 4 Problem Solvers got involved. Problem solvers called Nationstar, which agreed to put off the foreclosure for a month so Ms. Towery’s attorney could file the paperwork that Nationstar said would prove Ms. Towery was the rightful heir to the home.
But that month has passed and now, even with those documents in hand, Ms. Towery, who exists on $720 a month, doesn’t have the money she needs to become current on the loan and her attorney said his efforts to negotiate with Nationstar for better terms have so far been unsuccessful.
“They are not getting back to us,” said Crump. “They are not letting us know whether they will accept our offers.”
And now Ms. Towery is again facing foreclosure next week, November 7. A Nationstar spokesman insisted the bank is still trying to work with Ms. Towery, but has to follow proper legal procedures.
But Crump worries that time is running out. “It’s tragic to think of her not being there and her losing her home she has so much connection to.”
