The out-of-work actor standing in the driveway assured the officers that the family that used to live in the foreclosed house was long gone.
But the Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies were taking no chances. A few days earlier, one of their colleagues had been attacked by a pit bull while carrying out an eviction in Lancaster. (And a few days later, a Riverside man was arrested for rigging what looked like pipe bombs outside his foreclosed home.)
Deputies Anthony Munoz and Robert Cohen took out their flashlights and entered the West Covina house defensively. It is the Sheriff Department's job to carry out court-ordered evictions throughout the county by checking each room of a foreclosed home, then signing it over to a bank representative.
Shawn Lund, the actor who pays his bills these days by working for a company that handles foreclosures for banks, waited in the driveway. He stood next to a forlorn collection of abandoned toys, which didn't seem to faze him. His Bluetooth device glittered in his ear and he smiled in the morning mist. He said he planned to get back to acting soon.
The deputies returned in less than three minutes, and it took just seconds more for them to sign the house over to Lund. They had to be speedy, with a dozen more evictions ahead.
As they left, Lund said he would see them soon -- in two hours, in fact, at another stop a few miles away.
As the deputies make their rounds trying to keep up with foreclosure evictions in eastern Los Angeles County, they repeatedly encounter a motley cast of characters -- actors, retired police officers, locksmiths and specialized house cleaners -- who have figured out how to capitalize on the housing collapse.
Cohen and Munoz, who work out of the West Covina courthouse, say they run into these folks far more often in the course of a day than they do families being evicted. Cohen said they do about 80 to 100 evictions a week. Other teams work out of other courthouses around the county.
In the first quarter of 2009, L.A. County default filings -- the first stage in the foreclosure process -- were up 38% from the same period last year.
By the time the court has processed an eviction and the deputies show up to turn the residence over to the bank, most families -- even those who fought their evictions -- have packed up and left.
That's just fine with the deputies. Turning children out of their homes, watching fathers carry loads of belongings and mothers cry, is not a job either of them relishes.
