What three sworn affidavits forgot to say – and why it cost the lender everything
Connecticut's top court just killed a foreclosure because the lender couldn't prove it owned the debt – even with the borrower in default since 2010.
In a decision officially released June 2, 2026, the Connecticut Supreme Court reversed a strict foreclosure judgment against a Ridgefield homeowner, ruling that the foreclosing party never established, with the clarity summary judgment requires, that it owned the debt behind the mortgage. The case was sent back to the lower courts for further proceedings.
The facts will feel familiar to anyone in default servicing. In August 2007, Isandra L. Schulz signed a $751,200 promissory note payable to Countrywide Bank, FSB, secured by a mortgage on 20 Hamilton Road in Ridgefield. She has been in default since March 1, 2010. The loan moved over time. Bank of America became holder of the note and owner of the debt on or before March 6, 2012. Then the original note went missing while the loan sat with Bank of America's servicer, Carrington Mortgage Services, LLC. In September 2020, Bank of America assigned the mortgage to Wilmington Savings Fund Society, FSB, as trustee for Upland Mortgage Loan Trust A.
Wilmington filed to foreclose in October 2020 and moved for summary judgment, a ruling without a full trial. A lost note is not the end of the road; ownership of the debt can be shown through secondary evidence, usually a sworn affidavit. Wilmington offered three, all from Carrington employees. None did the job.
The court worked through them. The affidavit it examined first, from a Carrington pre-foreclosure compliance supervisor, never stated that the signer had personal knowledge and never connected her assertions to the company's business records. That alone made it incompetent evidence, the court held.
A second affidavit, from a Carrington default fulfillment manager, cleared the personal-knowledge bar but failed on substance. Her statements that the plaintiff owned the debt and could enforce the note were conclusory, the court found – bare conclusions with no facts behind them. She never explained how or when the plaintiff actually acquired the debt, through what transaction or conveyance. A muddled passage even suggested the plaintiff had held the note when it was lost, which the plaintiff admitted was never true. At oral argument, Wilmington conceded it was never the holder of the note and was seeking only to foreclose the mortgage, not to collect on the note itself.
The remaining affidavit had been prepared years earlier for a separate foreclosure attempt against the same borrower, one that was later withdrawn. It showed only that Bank of America owned the debt as of 2012. It said nothing about how that ownership ever reached Wilmington.
Stack the three together and a genuine dispute remained over the single question that mattered. Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice Mullins noted that had the affidavit problems been fixed, or had the original note simply been transferred to the plaintiff, the result would likely have been different. It wasn't, so the foreclosure judgment was reversed.
The practical lesson for servicers and their counsel is direct. When the note is lost, the paperwork has to carry more weight, not less. An affidavit needs to name who owned the debt, trace how it changed hands, and date each step – and it has to rest on records the signer can genuinely speak to from the business's own files. A clean assignment of the mortgage will not save a foreclosure on its own; the court was explicit that an assignee of the mortgage cannot foreclose without also having been assigned the debt. For default-servicing teams still working through aged, hard-to-document files, that is the line to watch.
