Nasty surprises await locksmiths

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Locksmith Brent Fasse squints at the map, double-checking the address of a house off the Paseo.

"This is it," he said, as he parks his Chevy Astro van, filled with thousands of keys packed into plastic storage boxes.

For all the misery of the mortgage crisis, with its foreclosures and evictions and interrupted lives, it's a good time to be a locksmith. Almost all the locks Fasse changes these days are on foreclosed homes.

Fasse has traveled as far as St. Joseph on foreclosure jobs and to every part of the metro area. He's changed locks on million-dollar homes and $30,000 homes.

"It's ridiculous," said Greg Fasse, Brent's father and owner of Greg's Lock & Key Service in Independence. "We've never been this busy before."

Evicted people sometimes do all kinds of mean-spirited things to show their anger, he said. He's seen overturned refrigerators with food rotting inside. Clogged toilets. Ripped-out sinks. Smashed-in walls. Yanked-out ceiling fans. Sometimes the vandalism comes from burglars trying to steal copper wiring.

When there is vandalism, other professions benefit. Banks call in carpenters, plumbers, roofers, yard crews. Homes must be in good condition to sell again.

For some reason, an evicted homeowner nearly always locks the front door.

"Out of habit, maybe. Or spite," Fasse said.

A foreclosed house usually has a sadness to it, he said as he walked through the other rooms checking for unwanted visitors. What was once someone's home is now someone else's property.

It's obvious that some have left in a hurry.

"People procrastinate and probably ignore the eviction notice," Fasse says. Whatever they leave becomes the property of the new owner. Fasse has seen big-screen televisions, computer monitors and, once, three fully loaded semiautomatic rifles. Closets full of clothes, prescription medicines and cable boxes.

Sometimes he sees family photos tossed like so much trash on the floor.

"It gets me when I see baby toys, you know? It's a bad deal for kids. You wonder where they went or whether they had a place to go to."

He tries not to dwell on who might have lived there, or what their story was. But more than once he's felt anger.

One house had three kittens, almost dead because of the lack of food and water. Another house that a colleague opened had a very quiet and angry Rottweiler waiting on the other side of the door.

Fasse works fast as he talks, drilling holes, installing new locks, checking keys. Sometimes he puts a key block on a back door, maybe a deadbolt on a side entry.

Most of the time he can be in and out in 20 minutes. The dirtier the house, the quicker he wants out. And he always calls the shop before he goes in to let others know where he is -- just in case.

Once he walked into a house and found a man sleeping on a couch. Fasse quietly backed out and drove away. "I sure wasn't going to wake him up," he says.

Another time he pulled up to a house and found an elderly man sitting on the front steps. A group of young men told him without words they would not let him change the lock.

"I felt like a jerk on that one," he says. "I told them, Look, I'm just the locksmith, not the bank."'

He left that job undone, too.

Still another time he walked through what he thought was dirt blowing over his boots. Turned out to be thousands of fleas. He burned his clothes and scratched itchy bumps for days. Now he carries flea spray.

He tries not to judge another's pain, but still, "Animals and kids have no control over what happens to them. It's irritating that people put themselves in that situation. Look what they've done to their family."

It's a lesson he sees over and over again, in houses riddled with fleas or rodents, overturned refrigerators, dirty floors. It's a huge incentive to work hard, he says.

"I don't want the bank coming to my house."