She was 91 and dying of dementia. City Hall fined her $39K. Now it says her family must pay.

Editor's note: This is the second story in a Desert Sun series on “prosecution fees” in the Coachella Valley. PART ONE | PART THREE | PART FOUR | PART FIVE

COACHELLA, Calif. – Dementia had consumed Marjorie Sansom, 91, leaving her helpless in her final years. Her family came to her rescue when she needed them most.

Her daughter bought her groceries when she could no longer shop. Her grandson gave her a place to stay when she could no longer live alone. Her disease made her appear mean and bitter, but they kept her safe and comfortable regardless. They loved her, even when she could no longer remember their names.

And so, when Sansom finally passed away in 2016, she left them one final “thank you.” She willed her daughter and grandson a small plot of land that had been in the family for four generations. It was supposed to be a gift.

Instead, the land has become a burden, saddled with a debt that the family never saw coming.

“I’m an honest person, and to me this feels dishonest,” said Christopher Slade, Sansom’s grandson and legal guardian, who is now being held responsible for his grandmother’s debts. “If I felt that I had to pay these fees – that there was a real reason why – I would do it. But this just isn’t right.”

The Sansom property – a vacant lot on Seventh Street in Coachella directly across from Palm View Elementary School – is the centerpiece of an alarming case of unsympathetic bureaucracy that calls into question the methods used by city officials and privatized prosecutors in one of the poorest communities in Southern California's Riverside County.

An extensive review of city and county records revealed that Coachella officials deemed the property a public nuisance because of a homeless camp and illegal dumping on the land in 2015, but never informed Sansom or her guardian of the issues, then fined the old woman despite a public record of her dementia.

Coachella stacked monthly fines on the property by mailing citations and important legal documents to an empty house where Sansom had not lived for years, leaving her family unaware that the dying woman was amassing debt. And finally, when Sansom died and the property was willed to her daughter and grandson, Coachella placed a lien on the vacant lot, saying it would seize the land from the family if they did not pay what the dead woman owed.

Today, that debt has grown to more than $39,000 – more than the acutal value of the land – which Sansom’s heirs say they simply cannot afford. Her daughter, Suzanne Avila, 60, of Indio, is disabled and lives on a fixed income. Her grandson, Slade, 39, lives with his wife, three adopted sons and two more boys under his family’s guardianship in a one-paycheck household in Twentynine Palms.

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Neither Avila nor Slade knew that Sansom had been fined, or that they were being held responsible for her debt, or that they were at risk of losing her property, until they were contacted by The Desert Sun in December.

The family has never seen a single citation from Coachella, they said.

“If I had gotten just one of these notices, something would have been done,” Slade said. “We are blindsided by this. I knew the property had gotten a little overgrown, but we didn’t know anyone was dumping on it and we didn’t know the city had taken legal actions.”

“If we didn’t know,” Avila added, “what could we do?”

When asked to comment on the Sansom's property this month, Coachella officials and a city attorney said that they were unaware of the owner's advanced age, mental state, true address or death at any point during the nuisance property case, but still stood by the actions taken by the city. Luis Lopez, Coachella’s development services director, said the city presumed the citations and legal notices it had mailed to Sansom were received – even though they were notified twice by the U.S. Postal Service that the documents were sent to a vacant house.

Lopez also defends holding Sansom’s heirs responsible for her debt, saying her legal guardian should have been maintaining her land and that funds collected from the lien would “go towards replenishing the public’s money” that was spent to inspect and clean her property. After The Desert Sun noted that a majority of Sansom’s debt came from punitive fines, which are not reimbursement of public money, Lopez said the family should still pay because of their negligence.

“The city believes these fines are justified in this case due to the willful, or at least reckless, disregard for the public safety of the community which includes an elementary school as evidenced by the nuisance on the property,” Lopez wrote in an email statement.

“Additionally, the fines are justified because there was no ‘good faith’ effort by the owners or successors in interest to contact the city, pay part of the citations or abate the nuisance.”

This discovery of the Sansom property case comes three months after Coachella was criticized by defense attorneys and civil rights advocates for using city prosecutors to force exorbitant costs on unsuspecting residents.

In November, a Desert Sun investigation revealed that Silver & Wright, a law firm hired as city prosecutors for Coachella and the neighboring city of Indio, were taking residents to criminal court for tiny crimes – like overgrown weeds or a broken garage door – then charging them thousands in “prosecution fees.” The tactic was denounced by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Institute of Justice, and although Indio officials defended the practice, Coachella leaders said they would rethink the strategy.

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Sansom’s story is different from these previously reported cases because she was never charged in criminal court, but the ingredients are all the same – a nuisance property, code enforcement, Silver & Wright and a staggering bill. Sansom's debt is the largest of any reported so far.

When contacted for comment, Curtis Wright, one of the partners at Silver & Wright, said he believed Coachella might “reconsider” holding Sansom's family responsible for the portion of the debt that stemmed from punitive fines, about $21,000.

But Wright stressed that he still believed Coachella met its legal burden to inform Sansom of her growing debt. If attorneys had known where she actually lived, they would have mailed her a “courtesy notification,” but they had no obligation to do so, he said.

“The city doesn’t have funds to do a manhunt for everybody who has a code enforcement case on their property,” Wright said. “Cities don’t have investigative reporters on payroll to find investment property owners.”

Sansom, who was born Marjorie Alexander in 1925, moved to the Coachella Valley in the 1930s so her father could work at a vineyard in Thermal. Soon, her family settled into a house on Seventh Street. It was a three-bedroom home on a redwood foundation with a small front yard, a metal storage shed and a cluster of palm trees in the back.

As a young woman, Sansom got a job at a local airport, taught herself to fly and found work as a private pilot shuttling doctors from Indio to Blythe and back. In the 1950s, she married Hershel Fell Sansom, a projectionist at Indio’s Aladdin Theater, who would be her husband for 50 years.

Sansom moved out of the Seventh Street house sometime after the wedding, but maintained ownership of the property. The house would later become a home for her daughter, Avila, who raised four boys in Coachella in the 1970s and 1980s.

Avila and her sons moved to Indio in the 1990s, when Slade and his brothers were teenagers. The house on Seventh Street was empty for the first time in decades. A few years later, a fire burned the home to the ground, leaving an empty lot.

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By that time, Sansom was an aging widow, living alone at a house in Riverside, beginning to show signs of fading mental health. As her memory deteriorated, Sansom suffered from bouts of suspicion and paranoia, her family members said. Sometimes she raved that her water was poisoned. Sometimes she forgot she ate and then thought thieves had raided her fridge.

The decline hit a breaking point in 2009 when Sansom grabbed a handgun and fired it into her mattress, just to “see if it would work,” her grandson said. Police detained Sansom on a psychiatric hold, which is where she received her first diagnosis of dementia.

It was clear that Sansom could no longer live alone, so she began living with her grandson on a small, dusty ranch off a dirt road near the Twentynine Palms Marine Base. Sansom began speaking only in vague, incomplete sentences. She always called her grandson “the man,” as if she was unsure who he was.

By 2011, Sansom’s mental state had deteriorated so much that Slade applied to become her legal guardian. A probate court in San Bernardino County approved Slade as her conservator, which meant he had control over her finances, property and medical decisions, similar to a parent’s authority over a child.

Sansom lived like this for another five years, completely dependent on her grandson.

While Sansom was quietly living out her final years in Twentynine Palms, her old home in Coachella had become a problem.

Two decades had passed since the fire burned down the house on Seventh Street, and years of neglect and illegal dumping had transformed the property into an eyesore. Shrubs and palm trees were overgrown and shaggy, and someone had abandoned broken furniture and appliances on the redwood foundation left behind by the burned house. The only standing structure, a metal storage shed, was carpeted with garbage. Because the property was across the street from a school, parents had begun to complain it was a danger to kids.

And the city of Coachella agreed. After an inspection in May 2015, Rosa Rosales, a city code enforcement officer, deemed the property a safety hazard, a fire hazard and a “visual blight.” She wrote a “notice of violation” about the property, then sent it by certified mail to a house in Riverside. This was identified as Sansom’s address in property records, Coachella City Hall said in the email statement.

In reality, Sansom had not lived at this Riverside address for about six years, since she shot her mattress with the handgun, according to her family.

Unsurprisingly, the Postal Service found nobody at the house. A few days later, a mail carrier returned the notice to City Hall with a yellow sticker on the front of the envelope.

“Return to sender. Vacant. Unable to forward,” the sticker said.

Coachella kept mailing important documents there anyway.

Six weeks after the inspection on the Seventh Street property, Coachella mailed Sansom a fine for $500. A month after that, the city mailed another fine for $1,100. A month after that, it sent another for $2,500. The pattern repeated over and over, with Coachella sending 10 fines in 11 months. But no matter how many citations the city sent to Riverside, the vacant lot on Seventh Street didn’t get any better.

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Finally, in June 2016, Coachella decided to try a new strategy. The case was taken over by Silver & Wright, a law firm that specializes in code enforcement, nuisance properties and cost recovery. Coachella hired Silver & Wright as city prosecutors one year prior to take a hard line against the city’s least cooperative property owners.

Daniel Pasek, an attorney with the firm, sent Sansom one last warning by certified mail. If she did not clean up the lot on Seventh Street in 10 days, the letter said, the city would take the matter to court, clean the property up on its own and then force her to pay the bill.

The Postal Service returned the letter with another yellow sticker.

“Return to sender,” it read, again. “Vacant.”

Both Lopez, the Coachella official who responded to The Desert Sun’s questions for this story, and Wright, the city prosecutor, said City Hall mailed citations to the Riverside house because it is required to send all legal documents to the address on file at the county assessor’s office, which maintains property records.

City Hall believed – and still believes – that this address was accurate, Lopez said.

“Because, as far as the city knows, the county property taxes are being paid for the property,” Lopez wrote in an email. “And the tax bill is being received at the same Riverside address and was being paid by the owners. Therefore, the city’s notices were presumably being received.”

Slade said he was paying his grandmother’s property taxes online.

Property records at the county assessor’s office don’t actually back up the city’s conclusion either. Documents obtained through the assessor’s website show that Sansom’s family sold her Riverside house in March 2016. Therefore, based on the city’s own explanation, officials should have known that half of the legal documents it mailed to Sansom were sent to a house that didn't belong to her anymore.

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Also, there was readily available evidence that Sansom lived elsewhere. For example, her conservatorship case – a public court record, portions of which can be found online – made it clear she lived at her grandson’s ranch in Twentynine Palms. The ranch was also listed as Sansom’s home on a government ID that was issued to her in 2013.

Coachella said in its email statement that this information was not “reasonably discoverable.”

Sansom’s family believes the city just didn’t bother to look for it.

“If they had done any research at all, they would have been able to find her address,” Avila said. “I just don’t think they wanted to find us.”

Sansom died in August 2016 after spending her last month at a hospice facility in Twentynine Palms. Her official cause of death was vascular dementia and cerebral atherosclerosis, a buildup of plaque in the blood vessels of the brain.

Four months later, Coachella made good on its threat to take her to court.

Pasek, the city prosecutor from Silver & Wright, filed paperwork at the Palm Springs courthouse asking for a warrant that would allow the city to clean up the Seventh Street property without the participation of the owner. In the filing, Pasek wrote that Coachella had “made all efforts to contact” Sansom, but that she had “ignored all communications from the city” and “utterly failed to take any corrective action to the immediate detriment of local schoolchildren.” Because Sansom had not responded to the city, Pasek said, she had “declined the opportunity to be heard.”

A judge approved the warrant five days later. Within a week, a city-hired contractor had ripped up the redwood foundation, demolished the shed, cleaned up the garbage and removed all bushes. The problematic property on Seventh Street was now just gray dirt and four neatly trimmed palm trees.

One month after that, in January 2017, Coachella decided it was time for Sansom to pay up. Silver & Wright mailed her an invoice – again to the Riverside address – itemizing all the debt she had accumulated since the first inspection a year and a half prior.

First, City Hall wanted $10,100 for the cost of hiring a contractor to clean the property;

Then it wanted $2,670 to reimburse the city for the time staff spent inspecting and reviewing the property – 22 hours, earning between $70 and $150 per hour;

Then it wanted $4,318 for the cost of the court case, which lasted less than a week and required no actual court hearings;

Then it wanted another $541 in “prosecution fees” even though Sansom was never actually prosecuted;

And finally, there were $21,650 in fines that had piled up at the empty house in Riverside.

Sansom, who was dead, was given 15 days to appeal or 45 days to pay by sending a cashier’s check to Silver & Wright. On the 46th day, the law firm filed a $39,000 lien on the Seventh Street property, which is valued at only $30,000, then mailed notice to the Riverside house that Sansom’s family had sold a year beforehand. If the debt to Coachella is not paid by March 2020, the Seventh Street property can be seized and sold to get the money.

One month after the lien was filed, Sansom’s will was enacted, officially transferring ownership of the Seventh Street property to her daughter and grandson. Although they didn't know it, they also inherited the lien, which means they must pay off Sansom’s debt to Coachella or they will lose the land she left behind.

Slade and Avila found out about the lien eight months later, when a Desert Sun reporter contacted them while researching this story.

At first, they thought the reporter’s call was some kind of phone scam.

Then, they realized that maybe they had already been scammed.

Last week, Slade and Avila hired attorney Shaun Sullivan to challenge the Coachella fines, likely in court. Sullivan was the first to bring attention to Coachella code enforcement while representing another resident who the city billed $31,000 for expanding his house without proper building permits.

That lawsuit prompted The Desert Sun to investigate code enforcement in Coachella and Indio, uncovering 18 cases in which the cities hired Silver & Wright to criminally prosecute residents for minor nuisance property crimes, then charged them more than $122,000 in “prosecution fees” and threatened to seize their property if they did not pay.

Avila, who lived in Coachella for decades, said she was heartbroken that officials would use such heavy-handed tactics in a city where many households live paycheck to paycheck. About a third of Coachella residents live below the poverty line.

“Coachella used to be a nice place …,” Avila said. “But if they get away with this, they’re just going to keep doing it. And other people are going to suffer too.”

Reporter Brett Kelman covers public safety for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at (760) 778-4642 or brett.kelman@desertsun.com or followed on Twitter @TDSbrettkelman.