Woman Who Occupied Vacant Home Sentenced

Lauri Lampkin got a four-bedroom house in an upscale Woodland Hills neighborhood for a steal, authorities said: no money down, no monthly payments.

The 43-year-old Los Angeles woman and her family simply moved into a vacant home in Woodland Hills late one night and installed phone service, utilities and cable television, according to the city attorney’s office, which eventually prosecuted her for squatting.

When the owners asked her to leave, she refused.

She was sentenced Thursday to 160 hours of community service after pleading no contest to a charge of trespassing.

Lampkin’s lawyer said she was the victim of fraud. She thought she was legally purchasing the home and moved in while the deal was supposedly going through, said defense lawyer Gary Yano. He said she may be guilty of bad judgment but not of intentionally trying to take over someone’s home.

“She had a contract,” he said.

Yano said Lampkin paid $3,500 on a lease option to a lawyer who claimed to represent the person selling the house.

“I don’t believe that was true,” said Deputy City Atty. Mark Lambert. “There is no record of that attorney with the state bar. There was no record of the person who was supposedly selling the house. He didn’t exist.”

The true owner of the home, 48-year-old Jeff Birns, said he couldn’t believe someone could just break into his house and take over.

“It could happen to anyone,” Birns said. “If you own a home, you could go away for two weeks and I could go to the house, break in, have the utilities put in my name and when you come home . . . the police are powerless to do anything. They’ll tell you to call an attorney.”

Lambert said there have been other cases of squatting--the best known being that of an Orange County businessman who was sent to prison for illegally renting vacant homes without the owners’ permission. He had claimed that an obscure squatter’s law made the practice legal.

But Lambert said he did not know how many cases there had been in which squatters simply took over temporarily vacant homes.

Birns said his house, on quiet Queen Victoria Street, suffered some damage in the Northridge earthquake, and that after years of trying unsuccessfully to negotiate repairs with his insurance company, he and his wife moved out and put the house on the market in 1996.

About Sept. 30 of that year, Lampkin moved in.

“My neighbors asked me, ‘Did you sell the house?’ We called the real estate people and asked them, ‘Did something happen we don’t know about?’ ” Birns said.

But his real estate agent told him the house hadn’t been sold. Birns called police and waited outside his Woodland Hills home. When officers arrived, he showed him his deed, proof of mortgage payments and his driver’s license.

Police talked to Lampkin. She showed them a contract and a quitclaim deed.

“The police were able to do nothing,” Birns said. He said he started eviction proceedings but quickly learned it would take months to get the Lampkins out of the house.

A month later, after Birns said he was able to get the gas turned off and after police served a search warrant on the home, Lampkin and her family moved out.

Lambert, of the city attorney’s office, said Lampkin at one point told authorities she had agreed to buy the house for $169,000, paid $19,000 down and was paying $4,500 a month rent until she could close the deal.

But she could never substantiate her story, and authorities eventually discovered the quitclaim deed was a forgery.

“They’re crooks,” Birns said. “They had it planned all along.”