NJ.com:

LAWRENCE — It wasn’t supposed to end this way.

Gloria Turano thought she’d be living on Skillman Avenue when she died, in the ranch home her late husband Louis built for them in 1953. She never wanted to leave it, and the decades of memories of raising a family it holds for her.

“I thought the undertaker would take me out of here,” the 90-year-old Turano said with a smile recently, sitting on a couch in the home’s den.

But as she spoke, the house was not hers anymore.

It belonged to Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage company, which bought it for $100 at a sheriff’s sale last year after a reverse mortgage company foreclosed on it – shutting down a loan Turano took in 2004.

She borrowed the money to help her pay her property taxes – in an effort to stay in the home. The taxes would be the loan’s undoing.

The money ran low, and Turano’s attempts to contact the lender, Financial Freedom, and refinance or work things out were never answered, she said.

She fell more behind in the taxes, and then legal notices started coming to the home from the lender around 2012 and 2013.