Fallbrook family tells a cautionary tale

Susan and Gilbert Jimenez of Fallbrook thought they were doing some good for the veterans community when they agreed to let someone claiming to be working for a veterans group onto their property to dismantle an RV they had gifted to the man.

The Jimenez's initially listed their RV on the LetGo app for sale, then reduced the price, before ultimately listing it for free or parts.

That’s when a man saying he worked for a “veterans project” responded to the ad, expressing interest. After agreeing to the deal, the man came to the property to have the pink slips signed over to him and check out the RV.

“He came and looked at it, he looked a little shoddy,” Susan said. “But we thought, hey, it’s for veterans. My husband is a veteran, so.”

At that point, Susan said, she thought the man would have the RV towed off the property and take it apart off-site.

“The next morning, we look in our yard and there’s another RV there,” she said. “We thought, ‘What is this?’”

Susan said the man told the couple that the RV was a little more difficult to disassemble than he thought and if he could stay there on the property, get up early and work on it all day, he could get it done faster.

The couple agreed.

As it turns out, Susan said, the RV that the man brought to their property was towed in and the man planned to take the engine that the Jimenezes gave him and put it into his RV.

Then everything went south from there, according to Susan.

“At first it was just him, then his wife moved in, then his offspring,” Susan said. “Then other people came to visit and stay. Before you know it, they acted as if they own the place.”

Gilbert, who suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, got angry.

“My husband told them, ‘you need to move now,’” Susan said. “They said, they didn’t need to. They said they had rights so they could live there. Tenants rights.”

Susan contacted their lawyer who told her that they may be considered at-will tenants, even though no money had been exchanged between the two parties.

Over the next few weeks and months, each party called the sheriff’s on each other several times until the man and his family decided to leave.

“We had the Sheriff come and look inside the RV,” Susan said. “He said there’s nobody here, so we had the RV towed out.”

Susan said now the couple is dealing with the mess left behind and the county that wants that mess removed, as well as permitting issues.

“Did we go about this all wrong?” Susan asked. “Here we thought we were doing something good for our veterans, but we got shafted. I am just worried that he’s going to do this to somebody else.”