Before I go into details I just want to protect the innocent by not giving the name of the neighborhood in question, lets just say it is around 7 mile and Woodward.

Our neighborhood has been hit by foreclosures just like every other community in Detroit, although maybe not as much as some. There is a home that we knew was going to be foreclosed on and we kept a close eye on it to make sure it did not slip through the cracks and end up being destroyed by neglect. So last October we were happy when word got out that the house was purchased and someone had moved in, but our excitement was short lived. Questions immediately started arising because we noticed that the home had never actually gone on the market. The new "home owner" was named Clarence Boykin Jr., and had apparently claimed to be related to the nextdoor neighbor whos name was also Boykin. The neighbors said they had no idea who this guy was so we grew concerned. I called the realtor and found out the house had not been sold and they had no idea who this guy was.

Soon we noticed that Boykin placed heavy black plastic over all the windows to prevent anyone from seeing what was going on inside the house. I began to investigate the land records on the home and soon discovered that this guy had filed a false land contract on the home giving himself title from the previous owner who I had been in contact with and had no idea that this happened. The previous owner had walked away from the home because after years of trying to sell it he gave up and said let the banks have it. When I looked more into the land records I saw that Mr. Boykin was filing fake land contracts for a bunch of houses so I immediately alerted the authorities to the situation in the hope that they would get him out right away. That was November, and it is now May and he is still there.

A few months ago I was keeping tabs on another vacant home in the neighborhood and it suddenly went off the market and low and behold Mr. Boykin had filed another fake land contract. So that made two houses that he had essentially stolen from the banks. In addition to the land contracts, he filed a bizarre document with the wayne county land records office stating that the homes he was occupying were actually in Highland Park and not in Detroit, so therefor the Detroit authorities had no jurisdiction over him. This just added to the idiocy of the situation and drew out the length of time this was taking to get him out.

Finally after months of begging the cops, the prosecutors, anyone in authority in the county and city to do something, we found a police officer who cared and was willing to aid us in this fight. And I want to clarify that this is a fight because we have seen how a person can destroy a house and we did not want to see that happen again and it was highly likely that this was happening. So finally it is now like 8 months of having this criminal occupying a home in our neighborhood and he has yet to be evicted, yet to be arrested. We can only hope that this happens soon before he can damage the home any further. I know those who read this will be asking where the owner of the home was in all this. Well as I stated he chose to walk away, but the banks still chose to let the redemption period run out and that was until March and we could not get them to speed things up even with the former owner telling them what the situation was. The home has in essence become an innocent victim to the miles of red tape in our current crazy system of economics and the way our government is slow to take action over anything.

There are a few reasons why I chose to share this story with all of you. The first is to alert the greater community to the threat that this individual represents because he has done this all over Wayne county, and I would bet he did it in other counties as well. I also wanted to share my concern over the foreclosure reporting websites such as realtytrac.com. It is my belief that Mr. Boykin was targeting homes based on websites such as this to file these fake land contracts because he probably figured he could get away with it since the foreclosure mess was such a mess and homes get lost in all the paperwork all the time. Lastly I wanted to write this because I have been frustrated at the lack of interest from law enforcement when we begged for help. When we would call the police we were lucky if they would ever show up, and often times those who took our calls would yell at us as if we were wasting their time. This whole thing has been aggrivating to an extreme because we all know if you let something like this happen in your neighborhood, it is like a cancer that can spread and kill your neighborhood. I know that there are people who might criticize this account because the neighborhood is upscale, but we fight hard for our right to have a good place to live and this fight has been one of the worst, [[except maybe the infamous Romney house).