A Georgia woman was arrested and charged with criminal trespassing after attempting to move into her own home but being turned away by an alleged squatter.
“I spent the night on a mat on a concrete floor in deplorable conditions while this woman, this squatter, slept in my home,” said Loletha Hale, who was arrested outside her mother’s old house in Livingston on December 9th.
Hale had arrived at the house to clean it out after a months-long battle with Sakemeyia Johnson, the alleged squatter who had been ordered out by a court in mid-November.
But when she arrived, Johnson, who had never been a tenant of Hale and was only related to an evicted tenant’s partner, was still inside, and he had brought someone along to intimidate Hale.
“I returned on Monday to start painting and she had broken the locks at my property,” Hale disclosed to WSB-TV.
“She just caught up from nowhere. She had this guy with her, and I locked the door. “I locked the screen door, and he forced himself to tell us to leave,” she explained.
Hale refused to back down, and the cops finally arrived. And when they did, bodycam footage showed an officer asking her to see Johnson’s side of the story.
“Think about it this way, though. Not everyone is as fortunate as you to have a bed. “All the little things, a bed in their house, food in the kitchen,” the officer explained.
When Hale refused to back down, she was handcuffed and carted away, with her arrest report claiming she “executed an illegal eviction and forcibly removed Ms. Johnson’s belongings,” and at one point “could clearly be heard stating ‘leave before I get my gun.'”
She was charged with a misdemeanor count of terroristic threats and criminal trespassing, while Johnson was not charged, according to WSB-TV.
“To see that woman walk into my mother’s house while I was in the police car, there is something wrong with this picture. “Something is fundamentally wrong with this picture,” Hale stated.
Trouble began at the house in August, when Hale claims she discovered Johnson living there without her knowledge.
Johnson was issued a squatting citation, but a Clayton County judge ruled that “Sakemeyia Johnson is not a squatter” due to her relationship to the evicted tenant’s partner, which she could be heard using in her favor on bodycam footage from the Dec. 9 altercation.
“I was cited as a squatter. “But a judge signed an order stating that I was not a squatter,” Johnson said in the video.
Hale fought that decision through a series of arduous hearings and appeals, eventually succeeding in legally removing Johnson on November 18.
However, the woman appears to have ignored the eviction.
“How can she not be squatting when I have never had any type of contract relationship with this person?” Hale asked.
Squatting has become a more widespread issue in Georgia in recent years.
In 2017, there were only three cases of squatting, but by 2021, there were fifty.
In 2023, there were 198 civil squatting cases across the state.