Great! This article just adds to my confusion! So many things I didnt know. Melissa owned the home. But it was in forclosure? However, it said that, in November, the "Trustee's sale was canceled". I don't understand what that means? Who's the trustee, and why was the sale cancelled? Does that mean her home was no longer in foreclosure? Wow. So many questions.
Melissa owned the home. It went into foreclosure. Then, the auction at which the house was supposed to be sold as part of the foreclosure was cancelled. This can happen for many routine reasons, such as: the bank reached an agreement with the homeowner to short-sale the house; an error in paperwork; a bankruptcy filing by the homeowner (although this has not been mentioned in the media; and other such things. The "trustee" is just a corporate representative of some bank or institution. This is normally never anyone with a personal connection to the homeowner.
The only thing I draw from this is that Melissa was in financial distress, as many homeowners in Phoenix have been over the past couple of years because they took on too much debt to buy too much house.
UPDATE: I reviewed some of her property documents, which anyone can by searching for her name at the Recorder's website:
http://recorder.maricopa.gov/recdocdata/getrecdataselect2.aspx
Her timeline of events is a textbook case of what happened in Phoenix en masse from 2008 to the present.
In October 2006, she bought the home for what apparently was a reasonable sum, borrowing only $60,400 to do so. Loans were easy to get in that time period.
In October 2008, right before or around the same time as the market plunged, she managed to borrow a total of $320,679 on the home. I assume this was a second mortgage.
In April 2009, it looks like that loan was transferred to another bank.
In November 2009, foreclosure proceedings were commenced.
In November 2010, foreclosure proceedings were halted, at least temporarily.
Because I'm no expert in interpreting these title and property documents, it's not clear to me whether she owed a total of around $325,000 on the home, or that amount plus the original $60,400 for a total of about $385,400. But whether she owed 325K or 385K, it's obvious that her waitress salary was not going to allow her to sustain her debt. She also wanted to go back to school, and God knows how she was going to pay for that.
Her stress from all this must have been tremendous. Given the foreclosure proceedings, and given her work experience in a strip club, I speculate that she may have been experimenting with creative ways to get herself out of the bind her youthful and naive ways had gotten her into.