AZ Fact Check sets Harry Mitchell straight!
The latest slapdown of Harry Mitchell comes from AZ Fact Check:
by Brahm Resnik and Bryan West – October 14, 2010, 6:04 pm
The issue: Eviction notice
Who said it: Harry Mitchell (D)
What we’re looking at: Did Republican David Schweikert serve an eviction notice on a 12-year-old-boy?
The comment: “Slumlord Schweikert served eviction notice on a 12-year-old child.”
The forum: Sept. 2 news release from the Mitchell for Congress campaign.
Analysis: First, David Schweikert himself did not serve an eviction notice.
He owns a company called Sheridan Equities Holdings, which buys and manages foreclosed homes for several investor groups, including a Dallas-based company called Swartz & Brough.
Schweikert says the company manages “a few hundred properties.”
After Sheridan either acquires or begins managing foreclosed properties, there are times when it must evict an owner or tenant, Schweikert told AZ Fact Check in late September.
Maricopa County Superior Court and Justice Court documents show that the owner of a home near 81st Avenue and West Indian School Road lost the property to foreclosure in summer 2009. It was then purchased by Swartz & Brough.
At the time, the home was occupied by a renter, who had an oral lease agreement with the former owner, court records show.
Sheridan employee David Kruger served an eviction notice at the home on Sept. 2, 2009, the same day Swartz & Brough acquired the home.
The notice shows that Kruger provided a copy to Jason Rodriguez, son of the renter, Maria Rodriguez, who was not home.
In a court filing by Maria Rodriguez’s attorney, Jeff Kastner of Community Legal Services in Phoenix, Rodriguez says Jason was 12 years old at the time and was upset by the incident. Those documents were the source for the Mitchell campaign’s charge. Kastner told AZ Fact Check that he does not remember the case.
Don Lawrence, a real-estate attorney in Scottsdale who works extensively on foreclosures, says handing an eviction notice to the child of a parent who rents a home is acceptable.
“As long as they delivered the notice to the premises, that is accepted (by courts),” he said.
But Schweikert told AZ Fact Check: “I just can’t imagine one of our staffers handing something to an adolescent.”
He then referred AZ Fact Check to Kruger. Kruger provided several photos that he says were taken Sept. 2, 2009, when he showed up at the Rodriguez home. He also supplied what he said were contemporaneous, detailed notes from the visit, which occurred early in the evening.
One of the photos taken inside the home, Kruger says, shows Jason Rodriguez holding Kruger’s business card in his left hand. The man in the photo appears to be in his late teens or early 20s. It is impossible to tell what he is holding. Kruger also says Jason Rodriguez told him he was married.
Court documents indicate the family moved out sometime in November 2009.
The bottom line: It doesn’t matter how old Jason Rodriguez was because Schweikert was not the one who served the eviction notice, as Mitchell’s campaign claimed.
