Note: This post is a part of a series detailing my family's fight with dementia and elder abuse.
If your grandfather has elected, in his dementia, to allow people of questionable character to live at his house, and, through a process of cajoling, begging, and pleading, they have refused to leave, it may be possible to avail yourself of the tortuous eviction process in your locale to unseat them from the house provided a) your grandfather agrees to sign the paperwork if you do not have Power of Attorney or b) you are able to obtain Power of Attorney and sign it yourself, but you would certainly be advised to avoid sparring with the legal eagle sovereign citizen types inhabiting the house and asking a third party professional to do it because they won't miss some minutia that cause months of delay, and, if you attempt the eviction on your own anyway, doing all the paperwork yourself, then it is possible to evict someone with the help of your local constable, nor should you be surprised, should your grandfather let them back onto the property in his dementia because he is being both stubborn and suggestable, to have to do the exact same process all over again (maybe twice if you screw up the paperwork in some small but easy to miss way again) to unseat them finally once you've been able to get him extricated from their influence and off the property.
By the summer of 2017, my brother and I had trespassed people from our family home only to have it reoccupied by those same strangers. The triumph in 2015 was turned around only a few months afterwards as they were invited back in and established themselves even more firmly. My grandfather provided various explanations (short-term charity, a favor to an old coworker, or a companion to help him from getting bored), but we could not influence him to send them away again. None of it made sense to us, and we were left to wonder if he was sick, in debt, being blackmailed, involved in prostitution, a drug addict, etc. His memory and recall were growing worse, but we didn't have any inkling of what dementia was nor who we should turn to. Our arguments about his safety grew more frequent, and on occasion he was able to be reasoned with.
The thing that shook him loose were discoveries that he had been the victim of check fraud multiple times, and he had finally become financially unstable. Some names that appeared on fraud notices, forged checks not in his handwriting, and ETFs on his bank account for utilities at other addresses include Quasheen Laster, Zakeyaha Amacker, S Jones, Zanay Pruitt, Tangela Reliford, Zaysia Chess, and others. We prevailed upon him to start eviction proceedings early in the summer of 2017.
Evictions are a touchy subject. Tenants say Landlords use them to terrorize tenants with short notice and for facile reasons. Tenants fear the black mark on their credit or being tossed out into the summer heat, and the process evokes images of your belongings piled on the side of the road. Stories about squatters in Vegas that abuse hearings and appeals, dragging their occupancy for months, circulate in media and parlor conversation. But what do you do if your grandfather casually invites people to stay with him in his dementia? What recourse do you have to make a suggestable man carry through with a month-long process that is a struggle at the best of times? Who are these people that won't leave your family home anyway? Can you trust the law to act, and how will these people respond to having a case brought against them? This uncertainty weighed on us as we started researching the process.
We chose an eviction as opposed to another trespass because we wanted to be sure the people taking advantage of my grandfather could be removed from the property without recourse. They were living at the house for months. They had taken control of the upstairs, the closets, the kitchen, and every other surface of the house. Any question that they had been living there for an extended period of time would be met with the law stonewalling us. A trespass could become he said/she said, and there was no guarantee that officers could be prevailed upon to enforce it again. Even though they were not ejected immediately, the eviction could be weilded by us should they return.
In Nevada, evictions are fairly straightforward. A Summary eviction assumes no hearing will take place. Tenants can object to this which will stretch the process out, but landlords that follow the process rigorously can do it without involving a lawyer in about a month. The cost is around $300.00 after service fees, court fees, and getting a locksmith to change the locks on the residence.
File a First Notice:
- The most important part of the eviction is doing your homework and filing the right type. In our case, our Summary Eviction used a Notice of Terminating a tenancy-at-will filed with and served by the Constables Office. Though the people living there had no lease, we found many hand-written notes claiming to be paying rent or giving them permission to stay. My grandfather had not seen nor signed any of these notes, but he could not remember if he had told them how long they could stay. Instead of risking a court fight over a verbal contract, we decided to file as if there was an informal lease agreement as opposed to none.
- The contents of the notice were straightforward. "Zakeyaha Amacker, et. al." allowed us to evict everyone in the house that was not related to my grandfather.
- Remember that you can have your work double-checked by legal self-help. The office workers at the constables office were also willing to make sure we had the right paperwork and right time.
- You will be asked to pay a fee to serve the notice. This was about $75 in Vegas when we did it.
Constable Posts the Notice:
- According to their workload, local moratoriums, and when you hit the office, the constables will go to the residence and attempt to serve the notice.
- They could hand it to the peopleliving in the house directly. They could hand it to another adult in the house. If no one is available, they will post it on the door to the residence so anyone can see it. The glue is sticky, and it will be difficult to remove from your residence without leaving a mark, but it is a necessary part of this process.
- Wait the prescribed time. For our Notice of Termination of Tenancy-at-will, we needed to wait 5 business days after posting. This process gives a tenant, legitimate or illegitimate, time to respond. If you are trying to defend yourself from an eviction in Nevada, see the legal self-help center to find out your options. A note that Constables calculate business days elapsed in the most conservative fashion possible. Notices usually have a 5-business day period that must elapse between serving and moving to the next step. So if you file on Monday and the Constable posts it on Tuesday, you would have to wait 5 business days thereafter to file the next step, the following Wednesday. These extra days add up throughout the eviction process! The Constables Office may be able to tell you when to return for the next step.
- Check on your notice by looking at the property to see if it was posted. Your tenant may call you to ask questions they should know the answer to. In our case, they tried to appeal to all the same things they used to guilt my grandfather into letting them stay, and we were beyond feeling at that point. If you are desperate for news, call the Constables Office to confirm your notice was served successfully.
File a Notice of Unlawful Detainer:
- This Notice is fancy legal speak for, "I told you to leave, and you're still here." If they have moved out after the first notice, no further harm nor foul need come to them.
- Similar to the Termination of Tenancy, this notice has to be served by a constable or authorized process server.
- Pay a fee similar to the last one.
- Wait a similar amount of time as the last one. If you had gone down on the Wednesday as I mentioned above (9 days since the original filing), you would most likely have the second notice filed on Thursday, and the next step executable on the next Friday (18 days since outset).
- Check if they have filed an affidavit with the court to object to the Notice. This must be filed by the end of the 5th day of the notice. You should be able to check whether your tenant has filed such an affidavit on their records website.
File a Complaint with the Court
- Get all the paperwork you filed with the Constables Office. This includes the badge number and date of service for each notice.
- Fill out the Complaint interview form.
- File with the clerk themselves at the court building, or e-file using the system available in your jurisdiction. Personally, I went down because the clerk was able to catch small errors that would have had seen our case denied. The clerk also double-checks that no one has opposed the order formally.
- Pay the fee associated with an Eviction Complaint.
- Monitor the progress of your case on the court's website. Your case number can be used to see if a judge has approved or denied your complaint. When e-filing, the system may assign you a temporary filing number that gets overridden when an actual case number is issued. The case number should appear in email from the court.
Schedule the Eviction with the Constable
- Once your case is approved, return the constable and file instructions for the eviction itself. Leave your contact details or the number of the person who will be preset at the actual eviction.
- Find a locksmith to change the locks or do it yourself. If you are evicting people from a family residence, it will probably be a stressful day. Take my advice, and engage a professional locksmith rather than relying on yourself to change the locks using Home Depot kits while deputies and irate tenants are watching.
- If you don't feel safe around your tenants, arrange someone else to be there with the deputies. You might arrange a police escort separate from the constable if your local Authorities CAn Be bothered and are trustworthy.
- Be ready when the deputies call in the morning to schedule your eviction. If you do not receive a call, be sure to reach out to the Constables Office to double check that they have the right number. It pays to be over-cautious!
- Be ready for the deputy to be frank with you and the tenants. They have done this countless times, and they have seen beligerence only witnessed by the most ardent bill collector. Give them space, follow their instructions exactly, and don't try anything cute. Be ready for the constable to eject unprepared tenants. Celebrate after everyone is gone and the house has new locks.
- Stay informed of your responsibility after the eviction. If the tenants did not vacate the property and take their things, you are probably required to keep them safe for a specified period. There is probably pre-arranged procedure for your former guests to retrieve their things, and you should accomodate them while keeping yourself as safe as possible.
- Arrange for mail to be forwarded to your tenants at the new address. Especially in cases of Elder Abuse, mail delivery can be used as a low-key excuse to maintain contact. Cut off your former tenant from needing a reason to approach your property.
This first eviction was at times both furious and quiet. Zakeyaha and the other people that took over the house began by yelling at my grandfather once the first Notice arrived. He deflected by saying his hands were tied by his grandsons, and I believe their outsized reaction kept him lucid enough not to halt the process. They then tried to bargain with him and us by claiming they were moving but needed more time. This would have been an OK thing to say if they had not said similar things to my brother and I only to not move or even appear to prepare to move. Finally, the day of the eviction saw incredible anger, but the most shocking part was that they had not prepared at all to be evicted. Nothing was packed, and what was packed could fit in a suitcase which they dragged out the door waiting to be picked up. We noticed missing mementos and jewelry as we were cleaning things, but there wasn't wanton destructions like you might see on a short-sale house from the Great Recession. It ended with kind of a whimper as evicted kids and adults were picked up from the porch throughout the day until no one was left but family.
Above all, we took a moment to revel in the relief from the people we had just expelled. As with computer security, physical access is 9/10ths of the hack. Without these people in close proximity, we were able to show the true state of damage to the house. Instead of rearranging the house and making it their own, they seemed to have lived on the things that were already there. Bookshelves were piled with snacks, junk, new knick-knacks, and drinks instead of being cleared out to make way for their own stuff. It felt like an episode of hoarders with layers of discarded clothes, papers and trash filling every corner. It took 3 weeks of labor to get it clean and clear of their things. The carpet was sticky. Every decorative container was used as an ash tray, and there wasn't a room where I didn't find evidence of their passing. But they were gone. I stayed the night with my grandfather for the first time in two years. I brought my son over to hang out. And we rested for a bit knowing things could be different.
Considerations for a Loved One
In spite of our best efforts, the dementia wasn't going anywhere, and the people that were taking advantage of my grandfather only multiplied from then on out. Slowly, he collected new guests. One was an addict in recovery, Tameron Moreno, and her boyfriend on probation covered in tattoos, Chris Moreno. She was arrested in a Target parking lot before we could evict them. We were also not able to prevent him from regaining contact with the people that had been evicted. And they sunk their hooks deeper into him. Multiplying fraud while his mental health declined, we had to exert even more effort to free him and finally get him the help he needed. Here are some things we wish we would have done after the eviction:
- Move your loved-one to a new location if possible. Let the property cool off as well if you are concerned for your safety while cleaning it out after they leave. If your loved one is going into a home, be sure to tell the staff that their visitors should be limited to known individuals and screened for his abusers. We had several instances of Zakeyaha and her mother attempting to take my grandfather from a home/rehab clinic when they learned we would not longer be putting up with their presence.
- Arrange for mail to be returned if not for your loved one still living at the address. Mail is a casual no-pressure way to get a suggestable person to allow former abusers to regain access. We wish we had enforced a greater embargo on these kind of casual contacts.
- Judiciously block and report calls from Zakeyaha and others associated with the evicted families. My grandfather is both unfailingly kind and suggestable. A request for a ride to the store doesn't seem like such an imposition. A daily ride to school for the kids that were also caught up in this situation was also a common tactic. Until it turns into a sob story about having nowhere to live. Most providers will allow you to block numbers from the dialer screen. If your loved-one agrees to make you an authorized user, you might even be able to more effectively block numbers and monitor new ones. We ended up blocking upwards of 20 different numbers over the five years of contact we had with these people. Be diligent and it will pay dividends.
- Clearing out their stuff might seem like a no-brainer, but we could not get my grandfather to allow us to junk their stuff after the 30-day retention period had expired. This opened a door to having them on the property to get some small thing from the pile of boxes that took up an entire half of a garage. Do whatever you can to remove their things from the property into a storage unit or similar. Junk anything new if you notice it. The people we were faced with used a slow creep to come back into my grandfather's life. Nip it in the bud by weeding regularly.
- Closer monitoring and a greater interest in his financial state could also have alerted us to his developing memory issues associated with dementia as well as abuse. He slowly became unable to shop for himself. He would handle cash poorly, and the bank took away his Visa Debit card due to fraud issues. The people living in his house convinced him to add 4 lines to his cell bill including new phones and he was stuck with a $2000 bill when they skated. Because he had been private and handled all of these accounts on his own before the eviction, we didn't find out about the escalating fincancial abuse until well after the second (also final) eviction. Some focused effort could have seen one or more of us added to bank accounts and bills to help him monitor and pay these on time. And they could have helped us identify fraud much earlier.
- The eviction order issued by a judge is a powerful new reason to have someone trespassed. Be forceful. Be stern. And remind your loved-one how you are scared for them, how these people make them unsafe, and what you have done up to now. The law will be increasingly on your side as you prevent anyone from taking root with your loved one. And the reliance your relative with dementia may have on his old guests will be replaced with reliance again on you and yours.
- Allow me to emphasize again how utterly useless the Metro officers and detectives of Elder Abuse have been throughout this entire process. Reports of fraud and theft were met with shrugs and sighs. Offers to escort us during the eviction went nowhere. After the second eviction, a CSI team took pictures, but nothing meaningful was done about the state of the house. The people abusing my grandfather were picked up multiple times for various crimes, but nothing ever came out of the stolen time and money from my grandfather's life. Don't look to them to save you or a loved one.
It may seem strange, given the hell we went through for five years, but we regularly think of how lucky we were. Given my grandfather's choice of houseguest, they had access to do much more long-lasting damage to the house, to us when we tried to help our grandfather, and to my grandfather himself as he declined. We did what he allowed us to as he started failing and flailing, but those short interventions helped us stay in touch for when he could no longer navigate. And as hard as it was, he is now safe and those people are no longer bothering our family. With fortuitous timing, an eviction for Zakeyaha and her hangers on was granted a second time just a few weeks before the COVID-19 eviction moratoriums in Nevada. We were just in time to avoid another saga to get them out of the house, and we could turn our attention to taking care of our grandfather and preparing to move on from the house of horrors.
