A suspected squatter with a bogus lease refuses to move out of a Chicago woman’s home — and there’s nothing the cops can do about it, the landlord says.
Danielle Cruz says ABC 7 she recently put the three-bedroom Chatham pad on the market, but when a contractor arrived to carry out final repairs to the vacant home, a stranger was locked in there.
Cruz immediately called the cops, but when the officers arrived, the nightmare house guest allegedly signed a fake lease and claimed to have already paid $8,000 in rent, leaving the cops helpless to hunt her down, she said. declared.
“They said, unfortunately, they couldn’t prove she was in violation,” Cruz told the station, explaining that she now had to go to court and go through the official eviction process.
The landlord said she was stunned that law enforcement would consider it a civil matter, due to tenant rights laws in Chicago’s Cook County.
“I definitely feel violated,” she said. “I own this house, and I feel like if someone can break into your house and somehow take over, that’s a scary feeling.”
And Cruz is not alone. More squatters have started breaking into homes in the area in recent weeks, local property lawyer Mo Dadkhah said.
Clever scammers can simply print out a fake lease and present it to the cops — or change the locks and pose as a landlord renting the place, he said.
“If someone enters the property in the middle of the night, no one sees him enter the property, he has a lease in hand. Well, a policeman cannot determine – he is not a judge – (if ) it’s a fake lease, or it’s a fake signature or if it’s forged,” Dadkhah said.
To make matters worse, the attorney said that in most cases, like in Cruz’s situation, police will refer homeowners to eviction courts — which are currently backed up in Cook County.
“The process could take six, 12, 18 months,” he told ABC 7.
The Chicago Police Department said the woman living in the pad met a mysterious man, who claimed to be the owner of the residence.
He reportedly presented her with a lease to sign, took her bail money and gave her the keys to the house, police said.
Cruz and her husband had just moved and were finishing a renovation of the family home, which they had listed for sale for $175,000.
“We honestly thought he was joking,” Cruz said. “So, we show up with the cops, and there’s a young lady in there with all her stuff.”
Neighbors called it annoying.
“No one wants to come back [home] and someone lives on the property,” neighbor Quintara Smith said. “It’s scary. I mean, it can happen to anyone.
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