It was a Friday, nine days before Christmas. Stephen Merelman, an editor on the Metro desk at The New York Times, sent me a message about an intriguing tip he had heard about a fire in Maplewood, N.J., a commuter town about 20 miles from Manhattan.
A homeowner there, Eve Morawski, had lost the deed to her home of 60 years after falling behind on taxes. Firefighters responding to the Dec. 7 blaze at the home discovered her inside; she had apparently set the fire herself after being evicted the day before.
Ms. Morawski had been vocal about losing her home on social media. “Do not let these bullies get away with this,” she wrote to friends on Facebook a couple of weeks before the fire.
I had a strong hunch there was more to the story, so I began making calls and asking questions. The results, published in a Metro article this week, proved more complicated than I had imagined.
With help from a New York Times researcher, Kirsten Noyes, I spent part of that mid-December weekend poring over a decade’s worth of state and federal lawsuits that Ms. Morawski had filed, or that had been filed against her, about the house and other issues. She often represented herself in court, and much of her legal writing read like entries in a diary. I was left with an off-kilter sense of actually knowing someone I had never met.
I learned from a police report that she had stabbed herself in the chest the morning of the fire. I also learned that a friend of hers, concerned about her mental health, had called the police in the days before the fire; she was worried that Ms. Morawski was suicidal, a detail that gave me pause about pursuing the story. My editor, Felice Belman, gave me the nudge I needed to stick with it a little longer.
In December, I headed to Maplewood to find out more about Ms. Morawski and had one of the more unusual experiences of my journalism career: Nearly every neighbor opened the door and nearly everyone wanted to talk — a lot — about the woman they had come to know and like and the convoluted run-up to the fire. Ms. Morawski was a fixture in the community, I learned, and the housing laws surrounding the loss of her house raised questions with broad implications.
New Jersey towns are required to sell unpaid tax and sewer bills annually, and it has become big business for investors, who can charge 18-percent interest on the so-called tax certificates. After two years, buyers — lien holders — are permitted to foreclose on property and keep the profit.
Ms. Morawski lost her four-bedroom house, worth roughly $700,000 before the fire, over an initial debt of $12,809 — three-quarters of her unpaid taxes from 2015. To outbid competitors, the company that now owns the home, Effect Lake LLC, paid the township of Maplewood a $92,800 premium, a common practice. The company also continued to pay Ms. Morawski’s tax and sewer charges once they became overdue by 10 days, as is permitted by state law.
By the time Effect Lake held the deed in 2020, it had invested roughly $175,000 to own a home worth at least three times that much. None of Effect Lake’s excess profit will be returned to Ms. Morawski. This is legal in only 12 states, according to the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian-leaning nonprofit, which has argued that the practice violates the Constitution. And it takes advantage of society’s most vulnerable, said Christina Martin, a lawyer from the foundation.
After the fire, Ms. Morawski was charged with arson and burglary and was held in jail in Newark. I put $11 on her jail telephone account so that she could call me, but we never made contact. I was in court on Jan. 13 when a judge ruled she could be released from jail, pending the outcome of the charges. A few days later, my cellphone rang. I was gratified to finally hear her voice and relieved to learn her account was largely consistent with the documents I had reviewed and the recollections of her friends.
We spoke for the first time for about 90 minutes. One of the questions I asked was why she did not sell the house before forfeiting it altogether. She mainly avoided the question, noting the many lawsuits that had drained her time and resources, her inability to find full-time work and the hope that she would somehow, ultimately, prevail. We continued exchanging emails over the next two weeks.
On Jan. 27, she emailed me a photo a neighbor had taken of a green dumpster piled high with furniture and knickknacks that workers had hauled out of her former home.
“My home and I are being gutted,” she wrote.
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