Stranger pays bill to save reservist's home

Article Courtesy of St. Petersburg Times

By SHANNON COLAVECCHIO-VAN SICKLER
Published on November 13, 2004

TAMPA -  The calls and e-mails started coming in early, and they flowed all day.

Tampa Bay residents offered to help out Friday after reading a St. Petersburg Times story about a 42-year-old Riverview man who could lose his home because he forgot to pay his $200 annual homeowners association fee while deployed in Georgia for the Air Force Reserve.

In June, the association at the Villages of Lake St. Charles filed a lien against Bernie Haithcock's $95,000 home, and association leaders this week said they would consider foreclosure.

Several readers offered to pay off Haithcock's mounting bill - which includes late fees and hundreds of dollars in legal costs that association leaders say they racked up pursuing the lien.

By Friday afternoon, Haithcock's pro bono attorney, Kenneth Grace, had dropped off a check for $1,148.50 to the association attorney, Elizabeth Frau of the firm Meirose & Friscia.

The check came courtesy of Insurance Consultants & Contractors Inc., a Tampa company whose owner says he knows what life is like for a deployed military man. ICC owner Robert Hoskinson's father served eight years in the Korean War for the Air Force, and on Veterans Day he had open-heart surgery.

"It just got under my skin that these lawyers and association people would do this to that guy," said Hoskinson. "That gentleman's signed up to protect our country, and you've got lawyers who haven't signed up for anything, trying to make him pay hundreds of dollars."

Hoskinson added: "So I'm paying the bill, because God forbid a lawyer in this town goes hungry."

The $1,148.50 is the amount cited in a demand letter sent to Grace by Frau on Nov. 5. Grace said Frau recently told him that Haithcock's bill now is more than $1,400, with more than $1,100 of it for the price of her time spent on the case.

Frau did not return calls from the Times.

"I'm beside myself today," said Haithcock, who has been at Robins Air Force Base near Macon, Ga., since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "I think this is proof that some people appreciate what we in the military are doing."

Grace said he doesn't consider Haithcock's case closed.

"We are paying this under protest," said Grace, who works for the Tampa firm Bush, Ross, Gardner, Warren & Rudi. "We will look into what we believe is the overbilling of attorney's fees and late fees, and we'll see if my client has any recourse there."