Two San Diego County sheriff's deputies escorted the pregnant woman out of her Poway home. It didn't matter that she had no car to drive and nowhere to go. It didn't matter that her baby was due the next day. The uniformed men had no choice.
Foreclosure had led to eviction, and Jan. 29 was D-Day. Ordering the expectant mother and the little girl at her knee to leave the four-bedroom house was part of their job, just the final stop on an otherwise average day that saw them handle 21 evictions.
The two men are among seven deputies in North County tasked with removing people from their homes.
Once the gavel has come down in the courtroom, once the eviction has been ordered, deputies such as Grant Erbe and Pat Morrissey get the call.
They will stay busy. In North County, officials said, the number of eviction notices the deputies will post is projected to be more than 3,200 this year ---- a jump of 38 percent over 2008.
Record foreclosure numbers, layoffs, an ailing economy all have beaten down struggling homeowners and renters.
For some, the eviction hammer will fall. And it is up to deputies such as Erbe and Morrissey to wield it without emotion.
The deputies have no power to give the homeowner an extra day, hour, even 15 minutes. Once they knock on the door, time's up.
"They think we have the final say," Erbe said. "We don't. We are working for the courts. I don't have the authority to do anything."
So when the distraught pregnant woman pleaded with Erbe to take her cell phone, to talk with her husband, it was fruitless.
"I'm not here to listen to the story," Erbe told the woman. "It's not going to do any good to tell me the story."
Nothing in the home was packed. A half-empty pan of scrambled eggs sat on the nearby stove.
Morrissey asked if her husband was coming home.
"No," she replied with a heavy Spanish accent. He can't. "He is working."
"Ma'am, you are going to have to move. Call him back and tell him that is the reality," Morrissey said.
Her daughter tugged at her, crawling under the table and peering up at the armed deputies.
"We don't have nowhere to go," the woman told them. She called a friend to come get her.
Moments later, Morrissey helped the woman carry a few bags and boxes out to the curb. Tears leaking from her eyes, the woman followed him to the sidewalk, the little girl in tow.
Behind them, a locksmith installed a new doorknob under Erbe's watchful eye.
Evictions on the rise
Last year, deputies in North County posted 2,326 eviction notices, up 10 percent from the previous year.
With the economy in a tailspin and foreclosure headlines dominating the front pages, worse is coming, officials say.
Based on the number of eviction notices posted in January, officials are projecting some 3,228 families and businesses in North County will be evicted this year.
"It used to be we'd go to more apartments," Morrissey said. "Now we see more foreclosures."
Erbe said his job is to present a person with the final court documents telling them to get out, and to make sure everyone is escorted out of the house.
"I often refer to myself as a mailman with a gun," Erbe said.
On this warm winter Thursday, Erbe had 21 evictions to enforce: 20 families and one business. The stops are generally scheduled 20 to 30 minutes apart. Erbe, with Morrissey as his backup on this day, doesn't have time to listen to pleas and sob stories.
The tight schedule is pretty standard, but there is no standard day. Most of the time, the residents have cleared out before deputies arrive. When people are still in the house, the scene is not only emotional, it also has a ripple effect on their next scheduled stops. Landlords and locksmiths are waiting at the next site.
"We are on a tight schedule," Erbe said. "We can't individualize service. We've got to move on."
And there are surprises. Morrissey said that last year he walked into an Encinitas place and found the body of a man who had committed suicide. Morrissey also found a note, in which the man had written that he had no place to go.
Another deputy said he served notice on a house, and found four kids at home and Mom at work. But this was the day and time to kick the residents out, so deputies had to call social workers to take the kids into protective custody.
"It's sad to see," Erbe said. "Each situation is unique. But from what I have seen on the foreclosure end, the people are trying. Nobody wants to lose their house.
"I think the ones that get me the most are the elderly on fixed incomes," he said. "They are the forgotten."
Swift and loud knocks
The first house, at the north end of Vista, was a simple, one-story home in an older subdivision.
The approach at the door is always the same: a few swift and loud knocks on the front door, followed by the shout, "Sheriff's Department! Court order!"
No response from inside the home elicited a nod from Morrissey to the locksmith, who hurried forward to work his magic. Seconds later, he stepped back and the deputies walked into the home.
This one, like so many they encounter, was empty. Here, though, pride of ownership was apparent. Everything was clean, from the white kitchen counters to a back bedroom, with blue paint and a playful wall border announcing that a young child once lived here.
The new owner is a bank.
Next, Erbe and Morrissey drove to a home in central Vista. They had to be there in 20 minutes.
The time they show up matters. At each site, real estate agents or their representatives are waiting, having paid the court $125 to have deputies clear the property. When evictions reach this point, the law requires sworn officers to be at the scene, to restore the property to the landlord.
When Erbe and Morrissey pulled up to the second house, a man in a dress shirt approached, offering familiar greetings to the two deputies.
"I should know these guys by name, I see them so often," said the man, a real estate agent who gave his first name as Matthew.
Turning toward the house with a wave, Matthew said he thought the residents had cleared out.
"It was occupied before the weekend," he said. "It looks like they got the message."
Again, a loud knock, a warning yell, and the deputies stepped inside for a security sweep before they handed over the place to Matthew.
This time, the home was not all that empty. Couches and mattresses remained, and the garage was packed with junk. And the smell was overwhelming. Perhaps it was gasoline, perhaps insect poison.
"You might not want to stay in here too long breathing this stuff," Erbe said. A wooden folding table with an open box of baking soda ---- often used in making methamphetamine ---- sat near the door.
Erbe said it crossed his mind that maybe meth had been cooked here, but there was no real evidence of that. Had it been obvious, he and Morrissey would have forced everyone out the door and called a hazardous materials team. This, though, was just a stinky mess. And it was time to move on to stop No. 3.
Coffee still in the pot
Next was an apartment. About half of their stops will be at apartments.
Some of the places are clearly low income, like the two-bedroom in central Escondido that rented for $1,000 a month. Neighbors, curious about the presence of two deputies, told them the family cleared out just hours before the lawmen came knocking.
Even with a late-night flight, the renters left the place clean, even the bathroom.
Not so at the high-end rental the deputies stopped at later in Carmel Mountain Ranch, where small two-bedrooms go for $1,800, and where one set of renters destroyed the carpet before they fled, leaving behind a wretched smell of dog.
At a high-end San Marcos rental, no one was home, but by no means was the apartment empty. It looked more as if everyone was just off at work and school. The carafe in the coffee-maker was still half-full, and family photos graced the fireplace mantle.
In what appeared to be a child's bedroom, video games were splayed out in front of a television and a SpongeBob stuffed toy peeked out from near the unmade bed.
The moment the deputies walked in, all those items fell under the control of the apartment managers.
'Welcome new owners'
Erbe's travels on this day took him past a large Mervyns store, chained shut, a grim reminder of a failing economy. And a harbinger of more evictions in the months to come.
At one house, Erbe and Morrissey stood for a few minutes, waiting for an agent who never showed up.
The deputies shrugged it off and headed to their next stop: a foreclosure, they assumed, because the plaintiff in the lawsuit was a bank.
The former residents of this three-bedroom home on Kenora Street, near Orange Glen High School, had already cleared out.
From the walls and items left behind, one of the rooms had been that of a girl, perhaps a teenager. She left a parting message, written in what appeared to be a grease pencil, on her bedroom window: "Welcome new owners of my home."
At their last stop of the day, the pregnant woman in Poway opened the door. Erbe spoke to her in Spanish, explaining what was happening.
She grabbed her cell phone and called her husband. "The police are here," she said in Spanish.
After hanging up, the woman eased into a chair at her kitchen table and explained her side to a reporter. She said she was aware of the possibility of an eviction, but said she had been told it was being handled and all would be fine. Her English was shaky, it wasn't clear if she was a renter, or the homeowner.
But it didn't really matter. By the time Erbe and Morrissey showed up, her fate had been sealed. It was time for her to go.
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