Brenda Booth was still mourning the loss of her beloved sister, Claudia Marie, when she found out her sister had transferred her home’s deed to a private company on April 26, 2022.
Marie died in 2022 after a long period of declining health. While Booth was preparing for her sister’s death, she could not anticipate what happened afterward.
Booth sought the help of probate court attorney Daniel Kalamaro to handle her late sister’s assets. Among those assets was a home in Clayton County, Georgia.
“It’s usually a fairly routine process: gather the assets, gather the debts, identify the creditors and make your disbursements and away you go,” Kalamaro explained. “That did not happen here.”
When Booth tried to sell her sister’s home last year, she learned the house was no longer hers.
County clerk records show Marie’s signature on a deed that transferred the home to a private company, EBA Capital Inc. Marie’s name was signed on April 26, 2022, but she had already been dead for three months, according to her state-certified death certificate.
Real estate attorney James Clifton considers the case a blatantly egregious example of deed theft.
“Unless she’s Lazarus or this company supposedly received the deed from her [or] sent a witness notary to heaven, there is no way this lady could have possibly signed this deed,” Clifton said.
Clifton says deed theft cases are “growing exponentially” in Georgia because there are few state protections.
“What they’re doing to clients like mine is just horrible,” he said.
Georgia law doesn’t require identification when filing property paperwork in a clerk’s office. It also does not require any proof to be shown the person filing the paperwork owns the home, so anyone can file a property deed on a home, WANF reports.
The newly introduced House Bill 888, known as the Georgia Not on My Deed Act, would make photo IDs a requirement.
Clifton and other real estate attorneys say law enforcement is failing to investigate these crimes. They want to see federal resources empowering police or the Georgia Attorney General to prioritize deed theft cases through dedicated task forces.
“We report it to local law enforcement. They tell us there is nothing they can do about it,” Clifton said. “They say it’s a civil matter only, even though there’s forgery, even though there’s fraud, which are crimes.”
WANF visited Marie’s former home. The man on the property would not say why he was at the house and said he was neither the owner nor did he know anything about the private business EBA Capital Inc.
Georgia Secretary of State’s registration shows the business is licensed to Emanuel Clark. Through police reports and a previous tenant, WANF reached out to Clark, who did not respond to texts or calls.
Clayton County police also contacted Clark after Booth’s family filed a police report. A follow-up report shows when an officer got Clark on the phone, he alleged his name was Andre Smith. The report said Clark was asked for identification during the call but did not provide it. As a result, the agency noted it wasn’t pursuing arrest warrants for theft by deception. This happened in September 2023.
Clayton County police told WANF that they were looking into it, but there was “no additional information at this time.”
Booth does not feel like local officials have taken the case seriously, and it’s left her feeling isolated.
“It’s been really hard,” Booth said. “You don’t have anyone to call and say, ‘Am I doing this right? What am I doing with this? How do I do this?’ You’re just by yourself.”
Link: https://www.kktv.com/2024/02/14/its-been-really-hard-woman-dies-then-her-familys-home-is-stolen/
