Houston, we have a problem. I think?

So we're scouring the arrest affidavits prepared for the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud case by non other than Detective Jorge Baluja for more comedic material for today's post when all of a sudden something struck me as odd in the affidavit.  For the uninitiated among our readers, one of the mortgage fraud cases that we've talked about on this blog has to do with the fraudulent purchase of a home by a man named John Romney who then according to the state turned around and resold the home using the stolen identity and credit history of Mr. Bernardo Barrera for a nearly $400,000 profit.  Throughout the last nearly two years Mr. Barrera has claimed to have been a victim of this fraud and has asserted that he had no prior knowledge of this transaction and that it occurred without his consent.  That's all fine and dandy, we've expressed our doubts about Mr. Barrera's assertions of innocence several times, but for the sake of today's post, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and move on.


While reading the arrest affidavit, I stumbled upon this paragraph that struck me as strange...

Nothing really wrong there, what struck me as strange was the following...

Purchased the home from Maxine Andrews and other grantors?  I don't know why this bugged me, but for whatever reason the "grantors" part stuck out like a sore thumb.  Was there more than one seller?  I kept reading and rereading the arrest affidavit until I found this...

Ok, that makes sense now.  The woman that is mentioned in the arrest affidavit as being the seller of the Oak Avenue home only owned 1/3 of the property and at least another 1/3 of the property was owned by the estate of Mr. Horace Young.  Nothing wrong there, as a matter of fact I actually knew a few people that would cruise the obit columns and contact the families of the deceased with the hopes of buying up their homes on the cheap and then flipping them for a profit.  Like I said, nothing illegal about such a deal, just a different approach to making money in Real Estate I guess!  What struck me as strange though was the following...

See that?  Why is the sale described as being from "Maxine Andrews and other grantors" elsewhere in the arrest affidavit and then described as just "Maxine Andrews to Property Collateral" here?  What does this omission mean?  Probably nothing, but it has raised our interest.  I've searched through the case file in the criminal court house several times for the original purchase contract for the Oak Avenue home and have come up empty handed.

What does this mean?  It means we have to take a trip to the courthouse tomorrow.  Stay tuned.