Two men came to my house at seven in the morning with an order to inventory my mother’s belongings. My sister had petitioned for emergency relief, telling the court I was removing property from the residence. She attached photographs of empty rooms as proof. Every photograph had a timestamp. All eleven were taken on March 2nd—the day the estate sale company did the walkthrough, which she scheduled and signed the contract for. Her own signature was on that contract, dated February 28th.
I gave the timestamps and the contract to my attorney in the same email. He filed them together, and at the hearing the judge asked her one question about February 28th. My sister said she had hired the estate sale company because she was “concerned about the condition of the house.” The judge asked why she had then submitted photographs from that same company’s walkthrough as evidence that I had removed the belongings. She said she didn’t realize the dates were visible.
My attorney wasn’t finished. He had obtained the company’s intake records, and they showed exactly who had requested the walkthrough, who had let the photographer inside, and who had been present while every room was documented. My sister had signed the inventory sheet herself. The supposedly “missing” furniture was listed item by item, with notes beside it saying where each piece was going to be sold. Then the company sent over the final invoice, and my sister had paid the deposit two days before she filed her emergency petition.
The judge dismissed the request and ordered her to explain why she had presented the photographs as evidence of theft. She couldn’t. But before we left, the estate sale manager approached my attorney and handed him one more document. It was the original instruction sheet my sister had given them. At the bottom, beneath the list of everything she wanted removed, she’d written one sentence in her own handwriting: “Do not tell my brother until after the house is cleared.”
