In August, local attorney Mark Melton accused a clerk at a Dallas County Justice of the Peace court of forging a notice in his client's eviction case. Since then, Melton has deposed clerks with the court who claim they didn't see the notice in question in his client's file until he came around asking questions about it. The judge and clerk accused of forging the notice completely deny the claims.
Chantel Hardaway went to court looking for a notice of a new hearing that was allegedly sent to her in June. The clerks there couldn't find it for her.Clerks in a Dallas County justice of the peace court offered testimony supporting a local attorney's claim that someone faked a letter purportedly notifying a defendant of a change in a hearing date in her eviction case.
Melton requested the default judgment be set aside so Hardaway could tell the court what happened, but O’Brien refused. That’s when Melton asked the court to turn over the notice they sent Hardaway about the trial date change. It didn’t look like others he’d seen. The notification looked like it had been typed using the Microsoft Word program and included the court’s seal in the letterhead.
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,” Lopez said. Veronica Sanchez, a counter clerk with O’Brien’s court, was one of the people talking about Hardaway’s case. She had picked up the phone one of the times Hardaway called the court about her eviction.
Evans is the bookkeeper at the court. She inputs debt claims and defaults. She’s worked for the court for some 15 years. Before Williams took over, she was the eviction clerk. She said she knows what notices from the court look like and that there are different kinds. “Back then, when I was doing them, we had a Word document that I would do,” Evans 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 in the aftermath of Melton’s claims, things have gotten more strict 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.
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 Hardaway after she left the court. “I did excuse 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.
“First of all, this is the defendant that is in question,” Williams said, showing a document 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 first suggested they do a hearing 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?’” “I did something strategic in this on the notification, given the past history of the defendant not showing up to court, not really paying very much attention to the citation or any notification,” she explained. “I actually sent this defendant the original, which had a giant copy stamp in red with my signature in blue to show her ‘Hello, hello hello.’ And then I put a copy in the case jacket. That is how that was done.
Williams and O’Brien, however, maintain that there’s nothing out of the ordinary with the notice they claim was sent to Hardaway. The clerks who spoke to Melton, Williams and O’Brien suggested, didn’t recognize the notice because they don’t work eviction cases, and they likely don’t recall seeing it in Hardaway’s file because there were so many other documents.
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