(Long) Legal question:

Factual Questions
1

I know the drill regarding legal advice. This isn’t (honestly!) for me, but actually for a couple friends of mine. This situation has made their lives hell of late. This is in Denton, TX.-a college town 40m north of Dallas.

They lived in a four bedroom house. All were 22+ years of age, so they weren’t expecting too much juvenile shit from the room-mates.
Over the course of time-as with most college housing-people can and people went, but they always found someone to take the lease. How it ended up though, well, it astounds me:

This guy moved in there, lived there for 10 months of a 12 month verbal agreement. He never signed anything, but he paid rent and bills to the renter of lease (complete with receipts of checks paid) for 9 of those months. He then ‘left town’ just before the 10th months rent was due. When he left however, he told his room-mates nothing and left most of his possessions. They tried over 30x to call him (and their cell phone records prove this) over the next week, with no response. All he said was that he was going to Houston for the weekend to ask his parents for money.

So they began to sell his belongings which he’d left behind for basically e-bay (or market) value. Nice $500 TV for $350. $150 for an old Dell PC. Etc.

They sold enough to pay the $700 in rent he bailed on, plus an extra $50 for the utility bills he’d bailed on. They kept the rest of his belongings in the garage for the 2 months.

Then, out of nowhere, he shows up and wants his stuff back and says he has the $700 he owes them. They say they sold it to pay for the bills while he was gone (and they honestly did).

A few weeks go by, and they start moving out of the house and he wants his things back, so they tell him to come get them. He calls a police officer to escort him to get them (which, btw, he didnt need-but she was cool as hell) and made a big stink as he moved his remaining posessions.

Well apparently after this, he started calling incessenantly the local police department wanting them to investigate and press charges, claiming he’d lost $5000 of stuff. Brand new the stuff doesn’t add up to $2500, but I digress.

He apparently irritated them so much though, that they finally sent an investigator out. Nice guy, but said he wanted them to return the stuff back to him (for what they sold it for) or else he’d file charges. Now they do know the people they sold this stuff to, but they don’t want to capitulate to the guy-nor do they want to get screwed out of that utility money.

So I ask the following;

  1. Are there actual criminal charges that can be filed against them, and what are they? Furthermore, in a town of 80k people, would any DA likely bother to press them?

  2. I believe they have a strong case in a civil court, is this true?

  3. They’re aware that he has over 10 warrants for his arrest for unpaid traffic citations. Would it harm them in anyway to press the police to arrest him for this, which they’ve been trying to do?

  4. He committed insurance fraud (sued a trucking co. for a wreck) claiming all manner of injury and distress, including lost wages, but was working the entire time as well as going to school. Beyond that, they took photos of him moving furniture despite his ‘bad back’.
    As you can tell, it’s a mess of a situation. All they want is for him to go away. The warrant and insurance business nothing more than potential retribution cards if they guy doesn’t. His possessions, in their mind, were abandoned there without notice for almost 2 months and were sold just to pay the bills. They in no way profited off of this.

I, being nothing more than a fan of Law & Order with some basic college law courses, propose that they wait it out and that the police were bluffing because they’re sick of this situation. This was, afterall, the same DA that didn’t prosecute the man that drunkenly (proved by the DWI 15m later) stole from my house and hit me with his car-solely because it was an ‘after hours fraternity/college situation’.

Any thoughts?

2

Tell them to get a lawyer. Why would you trust your friends’ peace of mind and, potentially, freedom, to some jerk on a message board whose bona fides you cannot check? That would be really, really dumb.

–Cliffy

3

What **Cliffy **said. Way, way, way too complicated for any kind of meaningful advice on a message board.

4

Seconded. Tell your friends to get their documents in order, get the details of the story straight, and talk to a local attorney.

guy_incognito, esq.

5

Okay, thirded.

6

Yeah, get a lawyer. And check the state’s rules about renters and abandoned property.

That said, I think your friends are in the wrong. The guy paid rent regularly for months and then something happened. He could have been in an accident or gotten arrested or something. How bad does it suck to come home and find your stuff has been sold for a crummy $700.00? And I doubt you can actually seize someone’s property and auction it off without a lien. If I were them, I’d pay some restitution just to get out from under and chalk it up to a lesson learned.

7

I concur with my esteemed colleagues and will only add that if you want some lawyers you don’t know to give you legal advice tailored to your friends’ specific situation, try these guys. They’ll not only do it for free, but there’s the added bonus that they’re licensed in your jurisdiction. Best of luck.

8

See, Finagle, this is one of the reasons I fear these threads. All the lawyers will beg off, and then a layperson will offer his uniformed speculation that has nothing to do with the law. The danger is that the OP will think your speculation makes sense when, actually, well, I have no fucking idea, but I can see the law going either way in appropriate circumstances.

–Cliffy

9

You can’t sell stuff that ain’t yours.

Can they claim his stuff was abandoned after two months,
although it was in “his room” and he promised to come back and pay his rent but they began selling his stuff after one week? Duh! :smack: Unlikely.

Can his ask for punitive damages. You betcha!!

10

On the other hand, Finagle, it seems your answer could have been much, much worse!

–Cliffy

11

FWIW. Criminal? Probably not, but no way to be certain. Civil liability? Probably yes. (In most every state, and I presume Texas, selling property to satisfy unpaid rent requires various notices designed to prevent just what happened here.) As has been suggested, your friends need a lawyer.

12

This is a serious situation for which your friends ought to retain a real lawyer of their own. Free legal advice given over an Internet message board is worth less than you pay for it. This thread is closed.

bibliophage
moderator GQ