Amazing Grace

From Merced, we have Foreclosure Story Comes Full Circle.

One man, Mark Gallegos, offered to tell me his whole story on the record. We sat in his living room and he told me how he had taken out several home equity loans to start a new business, the business failed and he couldn't make his mortgage payments.

Apparently the Gallegos' last-minute prayers weren't answered.

Their house was sold at a public auction a couple months after I wrote about them, and they moved out shortly after. They left behind two messages. In the driveway they spray-painted the dates they had lived there: 7/7/73 - 10/10/07 and the phrase "Gallegos Lived Here!". In the kitchen they wrote a small piece of graffiti: "This house was loved and lost by the grace of God by the Gallegos family be kind to it."

Before I go all Richard Dawkins over this sorry punk's ass, let us first observe the word "several home equity loans".

Let's see.

They lived there for 34 years; yet the house was not paid off; and they took out "several" HELOC's. Then they graffiti'd the crap out of the house.

The reporter failed to ask even the most basic of questions.

Who else wants to give them the Joshua Tree Treatment(TM)? We can take turns.