Time to Go: 'Squatter' Lingers in Tinley Park Home for Two Years

Screenshot: Fox32

Neighbors are fed up with a woman who has lived in a Tinley Park home rent and mortgage free for years.

Michele Parker has been told to leave the home on Mallow Street, where she has been “squatting” with her daughters for two years, but she refuses to go.

“It’s beyond frustrating, everything that she says has been a lie, she’s strung us along and like I said we were nothing but generous with their offers. We are working with her,” Robert Moss of A. Tarraf Construction told Fox32.

Tarraf purchased the property as an investment in November 2014, and he can’t believe the “houseguest” has outstayed her welcome in a neighborhood where homes sell for upwards of $350,000. And the neighbors are furious, too.

“It’s very frustrating, our property taxes are very high, I work nights to pay mine and to help support my family,” neighbor Patti Yara told Fox. “And I just see her coming and going without a care in the world. It’s enormously frustrating.”

Moss offered Parker $5,000 to get out by the end of last year, but she turned it down. He took her to court, where she claimed to have a lease in place with a rent of $1,500 per month. Parker reportedly couldn’t provide any documentation, and the judge ordered her off the premises by Feb. 7.

Yet still she stays—but not for long.

Moss and his business partner have contacted the Cook County Sheriff’s Department, and an eviction is coming as soon as next week. It might have been sooner, if not for Parker’s claims that she was housing an ill elderly woman (whom neighbors have never seen). Social services did find the woman when they stopped in for a home check, Fox reports.

It’s all just a part of Parker’s game, and she plays it well, said Moss’s lawyer David Sotomayor.

“I’ll call it a scam, because that’s exactly what it is,” Sotomayor said, “And she knows how to play the system and thinks she can get away with this. Well some point it’s got to end.”

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