My question involves an eviction in the state of: California
This is a bit twisted and long, but very interesting so please bare with me....
In early January of '08, a portion the ceiling of my top-floor apartment collapsed due to heavy rain and, obviously some bad structural stuff in this "Historical Monument" building. So I didn't pay for January's rent. Come February, the ceiling still wasn't fixed (they were saying "we can't fix anything till the rain season stops).
So basically I had to find people to crash with for a couple months. Then I went to get some belongings in mid-March and found an abandonment letter on my door, and the lock had been changed (the apartment hadn't been considered abandoned yet, it was just a warning, but STILL they changed the lock)! Basically they were saying that the unit would be considered abandoned in a few days. I protested this and they withdrew this abandonment thing.
I refused to pay rent for Jan-March because the apartment was uninhabitable. But then they decided to evict me for failure to pay because "no outside vendor had ever deemed my unit uninhabitable."
So they told me they were evicting me. I consulted a non-profit lawyer, and he told me to let them file the eviction, and I would have an easy time fighting it in court because I had pictures of the nasty roof collapse and water pouring in and ruining my bed, not to mention a giant chunk of ceiling resting right where my head would be if I had been in bed at the time of the collapse.
The non-profit lawyer told me to wait for them to serve me with the eviction. The landlord/property manager had all of my updated contact info about where I was staying at the time, so I was just waiting for the eviction to come. A couple weeks passed and I had the lawyer check to see if anything had been filed. Nothing. Then a month or two later, after never having been served I finally realized that they must be stalling for some reason.
So I called up the property manager, asked him what the heck was going on, and he said something like 'oh... well, I've got your eviction notice right here, and the sheriff came, and we took out all your stuff."
At that time, I figured they found some loophole and defeated me and managed to steal away all my belongings without me even knowing if I had been evicted or not. But it just recently occurred to me: If they had indeed evicted me and therefore had the right to claim everything that was in my apartment, wouldn't there be some court judgment floating around that says I owe the apartment building those 3 months rent plus attorney fees? After all, they know where I live, they have known all along, I'm an easy guy to find, so after all this time, if there indeed WAS an eviction, wouldn't they be after me for these 8 thousand dollars?
I now tend to think that they never pursued an eviction. They just tried to scare me away, and not let anything go to court 'cause they were afraid of me exposing some building code violations and shady roof/ceiling construction.
Now my biggest question is: If they never evicted me, were they allowed to take all my stuff? I had about $30,000 worth of property in my apartment, and I want it back. What can I do? I know it's been a little over a year since this all went down, but I've just now realized that there probably was no eviction in the first place, and by taking my property, they may have done something highly illegal.
Please, please, please someone give me advice.
Thanks

