She kept coming back to check the mail. The foreclosure, she alleges, went the other way
A Washington homeowner says her mortgage servicer foreclosed on her home after serving her at a house it had already deemed vacant - then let everything she owned inside be destroyed.
The lawsuit, filed August 6 in federal court in the District of Columbia, names Nationstar Mortgage LLC, doing business as Rushmore Servicing, alongside property-preservation vendor Cyprexx Services and UMB Bank, which acted as trustee for the loan's owner. Together, the homeowner alleges, they pushed a foreclosure through without ever properly notifying her - and the result, she says, cost her the house plus more than $200,000 in belongings.
The backstory, as the filing tells it, is worth walking through, because nearly every step turns on one detail: where the servicer sent its mail.
The homeowner borrowed $260,000 to buy the home in 2006 and paid on time for at least twelve years, according to the suit. In 2018 a storm ripped off much of her roof. Her insurance didn't cover a full replacement, she says, so she moved out temporarily to arrange repairs, left her belongings inside, and kept coming back to check the mail and the property. Then came a spell of unemployment, and in early 2020, a stroke. She fell behind on payments.
Rushmore took over servicing in March 2020, with the loan already in default. The homeowner says she kept in regular contact and gave the servicer a mailing address where it could actually reach her. That point matters later.
In 2022, according to the suit, Cyprexx changed the locks at Rushmore's direction. When the homeowner called to ask why, she says no one told her how to get back inside. By her account, the servicer had already deemed the property vacant.
The foreclosure followed in July 2024. The servicer and trustee filed suit, the homeowner alleges, and sent a process server to the empty house - the one Rushmore had deemed vacant. The filing says the server never reached her but claimed to leave the papers with a "co-resident." The homeowner says she never had one, and no one lived there. Never served, she says, she never appeared, and the court entered a default against her.
From there, the suit alleges, the misfires compounded. Later notices went to the vacant home even though the servicer had a P.O. box and email on file, according to the filing. It claims the Postal Service returned the sale notice as undeliverable eleven days before the auction, and that the sale went ahead anyway. On June 13, 2025, the home sold for $444,417.57, short of the roughly $470,862.05 the filing says was owed, leaving a deficiency of more than $25,000.
The homeowner says she found out only weeks later, when a relative spotted the home listed as "sold" on Zillow. She visited in early August 2025 and her possessions were still inside, according to the filing. Weeks after that, she says, they were gone. The suit alleges Cyprexx cleared out and destroyed everything - furniture, appliances, books, art, her father's funeral box and ashes, and the tools of her law practice - which the filing values at least $212,893.04. No eviction had been filed, the suit says, and nothing was posted telling her how to retrieve anything.
For mortgage servicers, the allegations read like a map of the places servicing can go sideways: the address of record, substitute service on a supposed occupant, the handoff to a preservation vendor, and what becomes of a borrower's belongings after a sale. The homeowner's claim under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act - the federal law governing how debts are collected - targets Rushmore directly, arguing that a foreclosure seeking a deficiency amounted to collecting a debt. Her three other claims - conversion, trespass to chattels, and wrongful eviction - say, in plainer terms, the same thing: that the defendants took and destroyed property they had no right to touch, without ever evicting her first.
She is seeking actual, statutory, and punitive damages, plus costs and attorney's fees, and has asked for a jury.
None of these claims has been tested in court. The allegations are unproven, and no court has ruled on any of them.
