Financial crisis: Woman, 90, shoots herself to avoid foreclosure

from: Telegraph.co.uk

Fannie Mae, the US mortgage giant, is to forgive the mortgage debt of a 90-year-old woman after she shot herself when police tried to evict her.

By Tom Leonard in New York

Last Updated: 6:38PM BST 06 Oct 2008

Addie Polk, a widow from Akron, Ohio, had lived in her small home for nearly 40 years but it was sold for $28,000 (£16,000) after Fannie Mae filed for foreclosure.

When sheriff's deputies came to escort the pensioner from her home last Wednesday, they heard shots from the first floor.

A neighbour found her lying on her side on her bed, a gun beside her, after shooting herself in the chest. She is now recovering in hospital.

Her plight was highlighted in Congress by the Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich on Friday before the House approved a $700 billion financial rescue package.

Fannie Mae said it would dismiss its foreclosure action, forgive Mrs Polk's mortgage and allow her to return home.

"Just given the circumstances, we think it's appropriate. It certainly made our radar screen," a spokesman said.

The decision has prompted blackly humorous claims in the American media that, if you want to save your home from foreclosure, you need to shoot yourself.

Robert Dillon, the neighbour who discovered her after she shot herself, said: "She said it was a crazy thing to do, now that she's had time to think about it."

Local police said Mrs Polk had ignored multiple notices and letters, as well as a foreclosure action filed in court.

"I'm positive she believed the deputies were going to come in, clean out the house and set her and her things on the curbs, because they did that decades ago. But that's not what happens nowadays," said sheriff's lieutenant Kandy Fatheree.

Home foreclosure rates are at record levels in the US, in many cases because buyers with adjustable interest rates could not keep up with sharp increases in monthly payments.

There has been a spate of foreclosure-related suicides, including a retired couple in Oregon and a 53-year-old woman in Massachusetts. The latter faxed her mortgage company: "By the time you foreclose on my house, I'll be dead."