toledoblade.com --

On a rainy morning last week, a black Jeep eased into the driveway of a Lewis Avenue house. A uniformed sheriff's deputy climbed out from behind the wheel and eyeballed the front yard.

"Everything still looks the same," said Deputy Sherry Stearns, who'd stopped by the unoccupied house the week before.

A self-described optimist with a cheery smile and a voice that can border on perky, Ms. Stearns, 45, is the lone sheriff's deputy assigned to oversee foreclosure evictions.

She may have the saddest, hardest job in Lucas County.

Foreclosure eviction is a straightforward process. It's a gear of bureaucracy that ideally grinds along smoothly if slowly, except when it's gummed up by human emotion.

First, Deputy Stearns "red-tags" a house, delivering paperwork and plastering a bright orange sticker on the front door that warns of the upcoming move-out deadline. Then, about 10 days later, she swings by to see if the house is vacant. If necessary, next she sets an eviction date.

Most foreclosures never get there. Of Lucas County's nearly 5,000 foreclosure filings last year, the contents of just 98 households were hauled to the curb.

Yet numbers can fail to describe reality. Deputy Stearns has encountered lots of eye-openers in the 10 months she's dislodged people from their homes.

Among them: A suicidal homeowner; an elderly widow, unfamiliar with bill-paying, whose soldier son returned home from Iraq the day of her eviction; an older couple shocked to learn of a son's failed promise to make their mortgage payments, and far too many abandoned pets.

Tuesday morning at the Lewis Avenue house in northwest Toledo, she glanced at the front porch of the bungalow. There, a child's bicycle lay on its side, as if some kid in a hurry dumped it before darting inside.

Near a back door, perfectly good work boots soaked by rain otherwise looked as if someone just kicked them off after coming home from work. Deputy Stearns rapped sharply at the door, then tilted her head at the hollow-sound noise.

"Hear that? Sounds vacant."

The back door gave way with an easy twist of the knob, and the deputy poked her head across the threshold.

"Hellooo? Hellooo! Sheriff's office!" she called out, holding a telescoping baton high. "I learned my lesson. I went into a house once and there was still a pit bull locked inside."

A sour doggie odor strong enough to wrinkle Deputy Stearns' nose hung in the air. Two bags of pet food stood propped against a wall. But on this day, no dog was left behind. Not too much was in the kitchen, really, except a palpable stillness.

Inside and out, this must be the aftermath people expect from The Rapture: Things remain, people vanish.

•

Earlier that morning, Deputy Stearns evicted a woman in a Bancroft Street-Upton Avenue neighborhood, meaning she stood by to keep the peace as a bank-hired moving crew emptied the house.

Under a relentless downpour, the curb in front of the Joffre Avenue residence grew crowded with couches, tables, carpets, odds and ends.

The moving-crew head on this job was Walt Behrend, whose gray hair belies his strong back. He's done this grimy work for decades.

Walt, his girlfriend, Kim, and Deputy Stearns have gathered often for this task, as underscored by their just-old-pals banter.

"There's a cat in there somewhere," Walt said, pausing at the curb. He gave Kim a look, and her eyebrows shot up. Between the two of them, they've taken home all kinds of unwanted animals they stumbled across in evictions.

"Hey," piped up Deputy Stearns, "remember that house with the dead dog? That was, what, over on Norwood?"

Walt instantly cited an address, but made sure they meant the same place: "You mean the one we found hanging in the closet?"

"Yeah, that pit bull," she said, but Walt took issue: "No, Rottweiler, wasn't it?"

Sherry Stearns has been a deputy for 15 years. Most of that time, she worked in the jail, the courts, or schools. She was never on the street much until reassignment in May to the civil division, where eviction duties revealed a metro Toledo she seldom saw.

"But don't get me wrong. This is all over. I have two going in Stone Oak right now, and I just did [an eviction] on an attorney out on Pilliod," she said, respectively citing a suburban Holland nouveau-construction McMansion subdivision and one of that suburb's verdant streets.

Apart from the growing sodden mound on the Joffre curb, a front porch overhang sheltered another pile - things the homeowner promised to return for by afternoon. Deputy Stearns had no legal obligation to accommodate her, but didn't hesitate.

"I try to be nice, because myself or any of my family could be in that position," she said. Hey, a friend of hers lost his own house plus two rentals.

Ray Doster, a long-time Realtor who handles many bank repossessions, admires Deputy Stearns.

"She isn't cut-and-dried, 'Get your butt outta here.' She is so patient and has such compassion. You know, I'm thinking of an eviction we had," said Mr. Doster, mentioning an Old West End street where grand, early 20th-century houses reign.

"And the woman [was in] total denial. She was sitting upstairs in a bedroom on the floor, and Sherry goes over and puts her hand on her shoulder and says, 'C'mon. I'm sorry, but this is it now.' That woman had every prior opportunity in the world to get out, and she just didn't pack up anything, and Sherry was unbelievably kind."

Deputy Stearns said that's been the most upsetting eviction.

"I got there in the morning, and she said, 'You know, I wasn't going to answer the door. I was just going to kill myself.' I was there all day with her. I just talked her through some of the issues she had. I didn't personally pack her things, but I'd get her through one room and then we'd go to the next one."

Every now and then, Deputy Stearns said, the woman still calls to chat.

•

Legal documents don't state if foreclosed houses are occupied by owners or renters, according to Jean Atkin, administrator of the Lucas County Common Pleas Court. Deputy Stearns' guess is probably as good as anyone's about that statistic.

"I'd say probably 7 out of 10 are renters. Definitely a lot more renters than homeowners," she said.

Deputy Stearns is not unsympathetic to the mortgage holder's position: "All the banks knows is so-and-so owns it and they haven't made payments." - but she tries to help renters squeezed in the middle.

"We'll call the attorneys and tell them the tenant is not a party to this," she said.

She's also called banks to seek delays for bewildered tenants.

"And I've had them say, 'No extension.' Except of course," she added, grinning and jostling a large black calendar, "I can get them the extension."

It is she, after all, who schedules eviction dates.

Little victories like these can help make a wearying job less so.

Occasionally, she said, she pulls out her personal cell phone to gaze at the stored photo of her 6-month-old granddaughter.

"I don't like to put people out on the curb. But it's the job I have to do," the deputy said, insisting in the same breath that she likes the job.

"Yes, I do. If there was someone here," she continued, gesturing at the vacant Lewis Avenue house, "I could to talk to them. If someone really needs to talk - oh my God, like this house I just served, over on the east side? I go in, they got two people. Then I look, and there's two more.

''And they all want to tell me how it all started."

So Deputy Stearns listened.

Roberta de Boer is a columnist for The Blade.

Contact her at:
roberta@theblade.com
or 419-724-6086

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