Long Beach woman challenges car loan ruling

A Long Beach woman in her 70s with $1,700 a month in income is challenging a court decision that she owes $21,000 for a used Range Rover she said she was unaware she was buying.

Deanna Cruse, 73, said she thought she was only co-signing a $758-a-month note for her son when she signed papers at a Queens auto dealership in June 2006.

Cruse's attorney, Frederick Brewington, of Hempstead, said a judgment in favor of the lender, M&T Bank Corp., did not take into account some issues that Cruse, acting as her own attorney, failed to adequately state -- including her belief that she had been defrauded and her complaint with state authorities.

But acting State Supreme Court Justice Denise Sher, in her ruling in February, said Cruse had signed the payment contract. Sher noted that while Cruse said she was defrauded, she never filed a complaint with the state attorney general or any other agency to support the charge.

Brewington said Cruse thought "she was backing up her son," Duane Wallace, as a cosigner for the $41,000 used 2003 Land Rover. But when Wallace did not make the first payment, due in August 2006, Cruse found herself "being dunned for $758 a month, plus late fees," Brewington said.

Cruse has filed a motion for reconsideration of the verdict. Sher last week gave the bank until Thursday to file papers opposing Cruse's request.

Cruse, a retired health aide, said that after the first payment was missed, she told the dealer she did not buy the SUV. "I later learned I had, unknowingly."

Cruse said that, in responding to the bank's lawsuit, she failed to mention that she had filed a complaint with the attorney general's office. Cruse said the AG's office told her it had been referred to the federal comptroller of the currency.

The attorney general's office did not respond to a request for comment. Dean DeBuck, a spokesman for comptroller of the currency, said, "We do not comment on individual cases."

Wallace, now living in the Atlanta area, did not return calls.

Nor did the dealership, Universal Auto Network of Jamaica.

Chet Bridger, a spokesman for Buffalo-based M&T, said the bank could not comment on an "ongoing court case."

Cruse said she didn't fill out a loan application and wasn't required to answer credit questions. "I never spoke to anyone other than the dealer, who sent someone to pick me up to 'co-sign' and [to] return me home," she said. "If I bought the car, why did they give it to my son?"

According to court papers filed by the bank, the SUV was repossessed and sold at auction. Sher granted the bank's request for $21,007.21.

Nassau court spokesman Daniel Bagnuola said the judge in her February ruling "had no discretion to consider anything other than the specific issue before it and the evidence presented."