Unfair Park from p6 wasn’t so simple when Hardaway and Melton began asking questions about her case. The deposed clerks also said they feared retaliation from O’Brien and Williams. Lopez, the civil clerk in O’Brien’s court, has worked at the court for 19 years. In her deposition, Melton asked Lopez if the court sends notices typed up in Word. She said she hadn’t seen this happen since the earlier days of the pandemic. “The only Word docu- ments that were ever sent were during the pandemic when they were being held virtu- ally or telephonically,” Lopez said. “If it’s an in-person hearing, then it’s a system-gener- ated document.” The system they use for these notices is called Forvus. Lopez said there was talk around the of- fice about a lady claiming she wasn’t served a notice. This was Hardaway, who came to Lopez to file a motion in her eviction case. “When she filed the motion, she said she wasn’t served, she wasn’t served with the court date,” Lopez said. “Well, it’s second nature, to me, for as long as I’ve been with the county, and you hear it all the time, ‘Oh, I didn’t get this. I didn’t get that.’ It’s sec- ond nature that you show them, ‘Here’s a copy of the letter,’ or ‘Here’s a copy of the citation.’” She was going to show Hardaway the no- tice but couldn’t find it. “There wasn’t one in there, but I didn’t think much of it,” she said. So, Lopez took the motion and Hardaway’s file to Williams. Lopez told Hardaway she’d get a phone call from the court and she left. The next time Lopez heard about it was when other clerks started talking. “There was talk amongst the clerks about this lady being adamant that she wasn’t served, like really adamant that she wasn’t served,” Lo- pez said. The next time Lopez saw Hardaway’s file was when Melton came in asking questions and wanting to see the notice. That’s also when she first saw the notice in Hardaway’s file. “I’m adamant that that letter was not there when Ms. Hardaway filed that mo- tion,” Lopez said. “And there’s no way I could not have seen that letter.” Melton asked if she was 100% sure. She said “200%.” Lopez said she felt the clerks were getting the bulk of the blame over the whole ordeal. “I feel like the clerks are made out to be the bad guy in this,” Lopez said. “The clerks are made out to be the bad guys as if we were the ones that did something wrong, as if we were the ones that created that document.” Lopez testified she didn’t feel comfort- able bringing up her concerns to O’Brien or Williams. “That would cause retaliation, put a target on yourself,” Lopez said. “You’re go- ing to piss off Lutishia, which is your super- visor and, honestly, Judge O’Brien probably wouldn’t have believed it … or that there’s any harm coming from Lutishia.” Veronica Sanchez, a counter clerk with O’Brien’s court, was one of the people talk- ing about Hardaway’s case. She had picked up the phone one of the times Hardaway called the court about her eviction. “We felt compassion toward her because 8 she was a mother and she had just had a baby,” Sanchez said. “Basically, our moth- myself after her leaving the first time and I did go and pray for her because I did feel bad for her situation, being that she was a single parent,” Carter said. She said she also felt bad because there didn’t appear to be any proof that the hearing date notice was sent. She said she is sure the notice in question wasn’t in Hardaway’s file. Carter said she didn’t bring this up to Williams or O’Brien because she feared retaliation. “As far as I’m concerned, it could have been resolved,” she said. “I make errors. We all make errors. If this was an error, it could have been ‘Hey, this is my mistake’ and it could have been cleared up.” The Observer interviewed O’Brien and Williams the day before the video deposi- tions were released. “We’re getting to the facts, the heart of Unsplash er’s instincts came in because we’re all mothers.” Sanchez has worked at the court for al- most two years and said she sees a variety of cases, from traffic citations to evictions. She said the only notices she’s really familiar with are those printed for civil court. Most of the notices she sees are system-generated, and she said she’s never seen a letter like the one in question. She never looked at Hardaway’s file but was able to see what was documented in Forvus. Sanchez said if a notice is sent it should be documented in the system, but it wasn’t. Evans is the bookkeeper at the court. She inputs debt claims and defaults. She’s worked for the court for some 15 years. Be- fore Williams took over, she was the eviction clerk. She said she knows what notices from the court look like and that there are differ- ent kinds. Initial notices are usually generated in Forvus. “Now, if you go to reset a case, then there’s a way to do it from [Forvus] or you can also do it from a Word document,” Ev- ans said. These days, though, she said, be- sides receiving the cases, she doesn’t do anything with evictions in the court. When she was the eviction clerk, she said she would call both parties to let them know if a case had been reset. She would usually note in the file to whom she had spoken and then send a notice by mail. Notes like these are present in docu- ments the court provided about Hardaway’s eviction history. One 2020 eviction Hard- away was involved in, which wasn’t handled by O’Brien, also had a hearing date change. A file from that case says both parties were called and a notification was sent by mail about the new hearing date. Hardaway’s current case file only says there was a re- quest for a new court date and that she did not appear. It doesn’t make any mention of a phone call or letter to either party. Evans said Hardaway’s case isn’t the first in which she’s seen a notice typed up on a Word document. What she described sounds similar to what the court claims it sent Hardaway. “Back then, when I was doing them, we had a Word document that I would do,” Ev- Clerks in Dallas County courts feel they are being blamed for court notice letter failures. ans said. “It would have the letterhead, and I would address it to who it was going to … and what it entailed, what happened, that the case was reset.” Evans said she was unclear about how the court sends out these notices now. Evans said in the aftermath of Melton’s claims, things have gotten stricter for her and the other clerks at the court. “We were told that if we are late from anything that we would get written up, or we’d get in trouble, I don’t know if it’s written up. But they told us we can’t be late, which nobody in there is late. But every time something happens, ev- erybody gets in trouble and she changes our lunches. It’s like we’re in kindergarten. If something is going on, we have to wait and see what’s going to happen to us.” Carter is the traffic clerk in O’Brien’s court, where she has worked for almost five years. She’s usually at the front counter and helps whoever comes in, but she’s also in charge of setting the traffic docket and in- putting citations, including eviction cita- tions. She also sends hearing notices for traffic cases. The notices she sends are sys- tem-generated. Carter said she’s never prepared a notice for an eviction hearing, but she’s seen plenty. For the most part, they’re all system-gener- ated and look the same, she said. Hardaway came to Carter’s window in early August asking about a writ of posses- sion that was put on her door, claiming she never received a notice about the July hear- ing date. That’s when Carter grabbed Hard- away’s file to show that a notice had been sent. She handed Hardaway the file to go through herself. “I’ve been trained to make sure that I stand there to make sure nothing is being taken out of the file, and that’s ex- actly what I did,” Carter said. “While Ms. Hardaway went front to back through the file we both discovered nothing was there.” Carter didn’t know what else to tell Hardaway besides that the constable would be coming and that she should grab as many things as she could from her home in the meantime. She said she prayed for Hard- away after she left the court. “I did excuse the matter because I think what is being ba- sically stated, we’re only hearing one side,” Williams said last Tuesday afternoon. “But there is a total[ly] different side as to why the court took the action we did.” O’Brien said she was happy to give some information but there were certain things she couldn’t discuss because of ethical obli- gations to the court, “which is unfortunate because I have a lot to say.” They primarily wanted to discuss the eviction process and provide examples of different kinds of notices that may be sent to people coming through one of the county’s justice of the peace courts. “I’m going to begin with the case at hand, the case that has led to all of this,” Williams, the chief clerk in O’Brien’s court, said. “I’m going to give you the facts of what occurred. It’s going to be real quick and fast. “First of all, this is the defendant that is in question,” Williams said, showing a doc- ument of several pages with Hardaway’s eviction history. She said Hardaway had a history of evictions dating to 2018. “That’s the first thing to take note of,” she said. “The second thing is that this very first eviction, which is not our court, … it was her first eviction in which she no-showed.” Williams also pointed out that Hardaway didn’t show up to other eviction hearings after 2018. Williams and O’Brien said many of the notifications that come out of the court are generated in Forvus. “It’s a record keeping of all Dallas County JP cases whether it’s traffic, small claims, debt claims, all of them,” Williams said. “That’s the current system as of now but that is due to change in October.” Hardaway had been sent these system-generated no- tices before in the cases she no-showed, Williams said. “So, all of the cases, if you bear in mind that she did not show up for [the hearings], it’s almost like she just kind of ignored it,” Williams said. “Or, I don’t know. Only she can explain that for herself.” “Now, between that time, unfortunately the plaintiff, which is the apartment com- plex, contacted the court via email,” Wil- liams recalled. “They said, ‘Look, we’re under new management. We would like to reset this case.’” Williams first suggested they do a hear- ing by phone. “Let’s do a phone hearing. The person’s been served,” she told them. “They said, ‘No, this is more serious than that. Can we just have a different court date?’” >> p10 SEPTEMBER 15–21, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.com
