Criminal charges filed against Karen Seemeyer
By Linda Bentley | October 1, 2008
Advocate still selling ad contracts
MESA – Readers continue to ask what’s going on with Karen and Tom Seemeyer, owners of the apparently defunct Desert Advocate.
Although, we’ve been told Karen Seemeyer continues to sell long-term contracts for advertising, she hasn’t published a newspaper for approximately ten weeks.
Meanwhile, those who attend the Daisy Mountain Fire District meetings said Tom Seemeyer, who is on the board, missed the last two meetings, with an announce-ment made during the first missed meeting to say he had a family emergency out of town.
Sonoran News has since been informed his mother, who lives in Wisconsin, had become very ill.
Readers who have called and written, perplexed as to why the Seemeyers aren’t in prison, may be interested to know criminal charges were filed against Karen Seemeyer in the East Mesa Justice Court on Sept. 17 for three counts of issuing bad checks.
Besides the pending criminal charges against Karen Seemeyer, next on the agenda for the deadbeat duo is the trustee sale of their home by the lender holding the first mortgage, currently scheduled for 12 p.m. on Oct. 27.
Although Sept. 19 was the date their home was scheduled to be auctioned off in a trustee sale, it appears the sale has been “postponed.”
Since the sale was being held by the second mortgage holder, we were told the holder of the second may be reviewing its options and reassessing if the home is actually worth the money owed.
It appears the Seemeyers have a first mortgage with an original principal balance of $168,500 and an equity line of credit maxed out at $100,000 for a total of $268,500.
The Seemeyers purchased their home in New River in 1997 with $5,000 down for $80,000.
Only months after they purchased the home, a notice of trustee sale was recorded.
They were bailed out of that one only to have another one recorded in April 1998, which they refinanced their way out of with a mortgage of $98,750, only to have another notice of trustee sale recorded in 1999 and another in 2000.
Then on Sept. 25, 2001, after the Seemeyers ignored the latest notice of trustee sale scheduled for that day, their home was sold at auction to Preferred Property Inc. for $87,639 cash.
However, on Nov. 13, 2001, Karen Seemeyer’s parents, to prevent their daughter and son-in-law from being thrown out of their home, borrowed against their own home in Scottsdale and repurchased the Seemeyers’ house on E. Cavalry Road for $110,019.70, earning Preferred Property a 25 percent profit over less than two months.
On Aug. 26, 2008, Attorney Gregory Robinson, representing the Seemeyers in the town of Cave Creek’s foreclosure action against the Desert Advocate for unpaid tax liens, filed a motion to withdraw as their counsel.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Bethany Hicks granted Robinson’s motion on Sept. 8, conditioned upon him providing the court with the Desert Advocate’s current address, which he stated was 711 E. Carefree Highway, Suite 203.