The Juneau woman who had her home foreclosed by Wells Fargo Bank was granted a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the bank and foreclosure trustee Alaska Trustee LLC on Friday in Juneau Superior Court.
Judge Philip Pallenberg accepted a compromise reached by Teresa Uehara’s attorney Holly Handler and Wells Fargo attorney Michael McLaughlin, allowing a TRO that will delay eviction pending a June 28 preliminary injunction hearing.
Handler and McLaughlin discussed the issue, and reached agreement, prior to court on Friday. Mark Skolnick, an attorney representing foreclosure trustee Alaska Trustee LLC, agreed with the filing.
According to Handler and McLaughlin all copies of the keys made by Wells Fargo and ATLLC will be returned to Uehara by Monday. Uehara was appearing telephonically from Washington where she was attending to family matters.
Uehara’s husband died on March 18 from spinal meningitis. The couple had been working with Wells Fargo to avoid foreclosure when Sadao Uehara became ill, was medevaced to Seattle and placed in the Intensive Care Unit of Harbor View Medical Center.
Judge Pallenberg wanted clarification, pursuant to Friday’s agreement, that Ms. Uehara would be able to return to and reside in her Mendenhall Valley home without fear of being arrested for trespassing.
“That is correct,” McLaughlin said. “We would take no action.”
McLaughlin also added that the agreement is not intended to make any admission of the allegations.
It was alleged by Uehara and Handler that Wells Fargo promised to not take foreclosure actions against them while her husband was in the ICU. Uehara alleged a Wells Fargo representative notified them of a missed payment and were assured that no actions were being taken on their home.
Handler said, in fact, that they did begin proceedings, boarded up portions of the house, and made duplicate sets of keys. Handler alleges Wells Fargo continued with the foreclosure illegally.
One set of keys was given to M&M Services, a Juneau business that secures properties. M&M Services is not alleged to have done any disservice. The company changes the locks per a work order, secures any possible insecure entry ways, removes items that might attract rodents, take photos of every room to document personal property inside and conditions and forwards said photos to the bank.
• Contact reporter Klas Stolpe at 523-2263 or at klas.stolpe@juneauempire.com.
Comments (13)
Add commentLet's hear the whole truth
Teresa is in Washington operating her janitorial business, not attending to family matters, let's get the whole truth before going to print, eh Empire?
She has no plans of moving back to Juneau. She wants to rent that house to the Coast Guard while she continues to live in Washington. Or maybe Hawaii, she took a trip there too right after Sadao died.
What really ticks me off is she's getting FREE legal help!
Let the bank do it's job, get the house sold to someone who needs/wants it, or if anyone should save it, it should be the man's son, who Teresa kicked out, which is why it was empty when the bank came to seal it up.
exactly lets hear the real truth people
What really makes me mad is i know lots of people that lost their homes due to their spouse being ill and medical bills stacking up but you never hear about it in the paper. It is unfortante that this happened but why on earth is it getting printed? There are so many other horrible things going on and Empire prints this? I happen to know the truth Mrs Uehara knew that the house was going into forclosure before she came up here she also knew he was sick but she was still in Washington she didnt rush to help him out till he got sent to Seattle. I know a great woman that fought hard for her house after her husband passed away she fought for 2 yrs before she lost it. It happens, also what about that money she got from the life insurance? Shouldnt that be the pretty penny that saves the house? Come on people Mrs Uehara is not broke by any means of the word and she shouldnt be milking out the pity party "oh whoa is me i lost my husband.." She had other men in her life and they were legally seperated, not divorced but they were not together it just didnt work out. I realize this is all a lot of info but what did she expect? She is airing out her dirty laundry on the Empire she should expect people will talk
Sounds like there needs to be
Sounds like there needs to be some follow up and further investigations done on this woman and her situation. There are lots of liars and scammers out there and this is beginning to appear to fall into those categories.
We need a national foreclosure moratorium
Aside from the fact that it's sickening to even try to kick a grieving widow out of her home(and, as a side observation, I'd also say that those who are local "Christians" should also be giving particular backing to Mrs. Uehara, since her husband was one of Juneau's best-known and most-effective clergymen)
there's something wrong in the banks driving people out of their homes during a recession caused by the financial system.
If Mrs. Uehara loses her home, it sends the message that in this town, money matters more than the dignity of human beings, and no one could really want to live in a place like that. There's no way that the short-term financial interests of Big Stagecoach are more important than letting a person who has just lost her spouse(and been left in massive financial hardship by a medical system that is driven not by its original calling to heal suffering but simply by the need to give its investors short-term big dividends, human life be damned) and needs a period of time free from financial considerations in order to recover from her loss and get her life back.
The posters here who have been flacking for the banks in this comments section should be ashamed of themselves. They're treating Mrs. Uehara as if she is a con artist, and they have no right to do that to a bereaved person. How can people back the banks against their fellow human beings and still sleep at night? Geez!!!!!
Hmm....it is interesting
That the Empire chose to report on this story. Who can say whether what other posters say about this woman is true - I didn't know here, but there isn't enough financial information in the article itself to make a judgement.
It wouldn't surprise me
if the "other posters" who slandered Mrs. Uehara are paid to post by the banking industry. No normal human beings would talk that way about a woman who is recovering from a devastating personal loss AND struggling to avoid losing her home to the bank.
Most ordinary people people support each other against the arrogance of the powerful.
It's not slander if it's true.
@kenb41: No one is trying to 'kick a grieving widow out of her home.' Teresa hasn't lived in that house for months. She left her husband and son and moved to Washington a long time ago. They were getting divorced. Teresa DOES NOT LIVE THERE OR ANYWHERE IN JUNEAU! She only wants to save the house so she can collect rent. She's not even trying to save it for their son and his family.
I have not slandered Teresa and I do not work for any bank.
The only thing *you've* said here that's true is that Sadao was a wonderful clergyman. Sadao was a wonderful man and it sickens me that Teresa is on the front page of the newspaper with her sob story when there are so many other deserving people who are losing their homes, the ones THEY LIVE IN.
You really appear to have it in for this woman
1)Do you have any proof that she's only in Washington state to run a business?
2)Do you know these people well enough that you know for sure that she had left her husband?
3)Why does it "tick you off" that she's getting free legal assistance? It's not like she's secretly a millionaire.
4)Whatever the marital situation of the Ueharas, if Mrs. Uehara HAD been assured by the bank that she wouldn't lose the house while her husband was in the ICU, didn't she have the right to expect that the bank would keep their word on this?
5)Even if she only wanted the place to be able to rent it, why should that outrage you? Mrs. Uehara has massive medical bills to pay off from her husband's final illness. That rent money might make the difference between her being able to pay those bills off or not.
6)Why do you appear to think that, if Mrs. Uehara is allowed to keep the house, this somehow makes it harder for other people in financial crisis to keep theirs? Does it really have to be that "zero-sum"?
Do you really know what your talking about?
@ Kenb41
Besides from what you have read from a very unreliable source aka the Juneau empire...
1) Do you have any proof that she isn't living in Washington running a business?
2) Do you know for how long she hadn't paid her house payment or any of her bills including child support?
3) How do you know that a representative for the bank who probably has no say so told her nothing would happen? Seems very unlikely
4) How do you know how much money she does or does not have?
5) Its one thing to rent it from the beginning and pay your bills with the money but its another to let drug users live there rent free and still not pay your bills, oh and lets not forget kicking her stepson out of the house....
And why should she be able to keep the house when she hasn't been paying her mortgage for almost one year and in her statement which is available on the state website her estranged husband fell ill in January of this year. So she should get to keep the house mortgage free... If that was the case and it was that easy then why is anyone paying their bills?
If I lost my job tomorrow should my landlord not evict me when I cant pay my rent for 11 months because he has pity on me? Lets be realistic that wouldn't happen and nobody would care about that and the paper wouldn't write about it either.
The point is the paper needs to get TRUE facts and both sides of the story before they publish false things or only half truths. Those of us that are responsible for our finances are the ones getting screwed over because others are living outside their means.
You two keep pitting Mrs. Uehara against others
It's not as if she HAS to lose on this in order for other people to be able to keep THEIR homes.
Also, I noticed that "AKGal" made a post about a previous article on Mrs. Uehara over the weekend that was deleted..which would have meant that several other posters would have to have complained about the offensiveness of the post.
What did Mrs. Uehara ever do to either of you? You two posters, with suspiciously similar posting names, seem determined to vilify her. There's really no reason for you to single her out like this.
And do you have any proof of the "drug users" thing?
Or are you just looking for anything to put this woman in the worst possible light?
This really looks like you have a vendetta going against Mrs. Uehara.
you are doing the same thing
I dont even personally know this lady so its not about having it out for her. You can get a lot of information on the AK state website like I said earlier of all the court cases and fines she has ever had. The point isnt this lady I feel bad for what is going on in her personal life but SHE is the one who wanted to make this public and if your going to do that then you need to get all sides of the story. She wanted to make a bank look bad and make herself look so innocent when that doesnt seem to be the facts. And I am not siding with either side my point is that the newspaper shouldnt print half truths and if this lady didnt want her dirty laundry out and about she should have just gone about her business trying to get her hosue back without going to the media.
Why do you care how a bank looks?
A bank isn't a person. It doesn't actually have feelings. And banks shouldn't be above the human race.
And she didn't want, from what I could see, to "make a bank look bad". She just didn't want to lose her home(or at least the property from which she could have gained the rental income that might have made it possible to repay the unjust debts the treatment-for-profit medical system inflicted on her during her and her family during her husband's last illness), and once she was left with no alternative but to go to court(and we both know she HAD no alternative after they changed the locks)it was going to be public record. It was impossible for this to NOT go to the media.
The bank should just have kept its word to Mrs. Uehara, rather than treating her like a deadbeat or a criminal. Doing so wouldn't have affected any of the other people who are struggling with mortgage issues thanks to the banking deregulation of the 1990's. If you actually cared about THEM, you'd support a national foreclosure moratorium and the passage of a new Glass-Stegall-like act that would actually protect people from the greed, lies and arrogance of Big Finance.