Joe Nocera, NY Times

Lilla Roberts is a 73-year-old retired physical therapist, a pleasant, engaging woman who moved to this country from Jamaica 46 years ago. In 1988, she bought a small house in Jamaica, Queens, putting down $25,000, and taking out a mortgage for around $120,000. For many years, she religiously made her mortgage payments.

Like most homes in this part of Queens, this one is a little on the ramshackle side: a small, two-story home, part brick, part faded gray siding, with a red awning out front and a large backyard. But she raised her children and several of her grandchildren in this home. Her life’s memories are in this home. It means a lot to her.

“My whole life is here,” she said on Tuesday, when I visited her. “Every penny I ever had I put into this house.”

Ms. Roberts pointed down. “I finished the basement,” she said. She pointed up. “I had to put in new windows and repair all the rotting wood,” she said, referring to an upstairs apartment she rents out.

She pointed toward the back of the house, to the yard beyond her cramped kitchen and her two crowded bedrooms. “I love my garden,” she said. She paused, and then sighed. Between her pension, Social Security and rental income, she said, “I have enough income to pay my mortgage. I would love to enjoy the rest of my life here.”

Sitting across from Ms. Roberts was Elizabeth Lynch, a 30-something lawyer who works for MFY Legal Services. Ms. Lynch is a foreclosure specialist who has spent the last few months trying desperately to keep Ms. Roberts from losing her home. In 2007, a year after a refinancing, Ms. Roberts suffered a temporary setback that caused her to stop paying her mortgage for less than a year. Given her situation — steady income, a history of reliability — you would think that she would be a perfect candidate for a mortgage modification.

Instead, her servicer, Bank of America, foreclosed on the property in late August and handed it off to Fannie Mae, which owned the mortgage. Ms. Roberts first learned this when she saw Fannie Mae’s eviction notice taped to her front door.

As part of her effort to save Ms. Roberts’ house, Ms. Lynch filed a lawsuit to undo the foreclosure, on the grounds that fraud had been committed at various points along the way. Although such suits rarely succeed, a judge agreed to hear the case in early January.

Another part of her effort, though, was to try to create some media interest, which is how I got involved. “With all of the foreclosure cases I have seen,” Ms. Lynch wrote in an e-mail, “this is the one that gets at me the most.”

Truth to tell, Ms. Roberts’s story got to me too. Even putting aside the possibility of fraud, nobody should have to endure what she’s been through. Since March 2008 — that’s right, two and a half years — she has spent nearly $30,000 trying to hold onto her home. She has had to deal with a nasty foreclosure mill law firm, with servicing employees who gave her the runaround and with a foreclosure process that took place behind her back. And she has had to deal with the anxiety of not knowing whether she would be able to keep her home.

Yes, there are people who took out mortgages knowing they could never pay the money back. Ms. Roberts is not one of them. Rather, she is one of the many Americans, mostly poor and lower-middle class, who have been devastated by a system that is as rapacious, uncaring — and sloppy — in tossing people out of their homes as it once was in foisting predatory mortgages on them.

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