Asheville Watchdog

Asheville Lawyer Arrested, Charged With Felonies in Real Estate Deals

Her client, Lisa Roberts, also arrested on 32 forgery charges

By SALLY KESTIN (June 16, 2022)

Asheville Lawyer Arrested, Charged With Felonies in Real Estate Deals

Ilesanmi “Ile” O. Adaramola // Photo credit: Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office

An Asheville attorney was arrested this week on six felony charges related to Buncombe County real estate deals, and her client, a woman already charged with fraud, was arrested on 32 additional counts of felony forgery.

Lisa K. Roberts was charged with forging her uncle’s signature on deeds, mortgages, and checks, and the attorney, Ilesanmi “Ile” O. Adaramola, was charged with notarizing the signature on legal documents.

Arrest warrants say Adaramola, 37, “while acting as a duly commissioned North Carolina notary public did take an acknowledgment the notary knew was false of [sic] fraudulent.” Each of the six counts against her is a Class I felony, the least serious, punishable by up to 24 months in prison. But barring any criminal history, under state sentencing guidelines she would likely receive probation.

Roberts,

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Buncombe Lawyers, Others Accused of Fraud

Court complaint details scheme to take ex-cop’s home equity

By SALLY KESTIN (June 8, 2022)

Buncombe Lawyers, Others Accused of Fraud

Attorney Tikkun Gottschalk argues the scheme was a "fraud on the court" at an April hearing before Buncombe Superior Court Judge Alan Thornburg. Credit: Pat Barcas for Asheville Watchdog

A guardian for a former law enforcement officer has filed a complaint in court accusing three Buncombe attorneys and two others of fraud in a scheme to illegally sell his house and keep more than $40,000 in proceeds that belonged to him.

The complaint, filed on behalf of David Shroat, is among the first attempts to recoup money for a homeowner in real estate deals exposed by Asheville Watchdog in its investigative series, Equity Erased.

Shroat, a former Asheville police officer and Buncombe sheriff’s detective, was showing signs of dementia, according to his lawyer, when in 2018, his Arden house was sold through a series of property transfers and court actions. Shroat owned more than $40,000 in equity but came away with nothing.

**David Shroat // Photo courtesy of Kelly Southerland**

The complaint names as “fraud defendants” the following people:

— Lisa Roberts,

2 Years in Making, California Reparations Report Offers Ideas For Asheville-Buncombe Commission

By SCOTT CARROLL (June 6, 2022)

2 Years in Making, California Reparations Report Offers Ideas For Asheville-Buncombe Commission

Two years ago, as violent protests shook Asheville and other cities after George Floyd was murdered while in Minneapolis police custody, the Asheville City Council and the Buncombe County Commission passed resolutions in support of reparations for Black residents, to make amends for historic discrimination. Acting at the same time, California established a task force to study and develop a plan for reparations in that state.

Last week, the task force overseeing California’s reparations effort released the first part of its work: a landmark 500-page report documenting nearly two centuries of systemic discrimination imposed by the state, the harm it caused, and what needs to be done to attempt to address that harm.

The California report arrives just before the Asheville and Buncombe Community Reparations Commission will meet for just the third time. The meeting is scheduled for Monday from 6 p.m.

An Open Letter to the Asheville Community

By SCOTT CARROLL (June 1, 2022)

Hello, my name is Scott Carroll and today — June 1, 2022 — is my first official day as a reporter for The Asheville Watchdog. I would like to take this occasion to introduce myself, explain my role here, and ask for your help moving forward.

My primary focus will be covering the reparations process here, which was approved by the Asheville City Council and the Buncombe County Commission two years ago. In addition to covering reparations, I will be writing about homelessness and related social justice issues.

Photo of Asheville Watchdog reporter Scott Carroll — **Scott Carroll**

I am the first paid staff reporter for The Watchdog, a nonprofit online news organization that was launched in 2020 and continues to be run by volunteer, award-winning journalists and media executives who live in Asheville and care deeply about the community.

Hunting for dead dad’s missing money, grieving son finds pain, anger … and a clue

Bank trail leads to Asheville woman already facing fraud charges

By SALLY KESTIN (May 21, 2022)

Hunting for dead dad’s missing money, grieving son finds pain, anger … and a clue

George Jones and his house in Asheville

George Jones died on Christmas Day 2019, rear-ended while pulled over on the shoulder of Interstate 26 in Woodfin.

Jones, 85, wore pants over his pajama bottoms, one shoe, two shirts, and a hat. His deteriorating mental state was the only explanation his son, Drake Jones, could fathom for why his father wound up on the highway’s edge at nearly 2 a.m.

But sorting through his father’s affairs, Jones came away with more unsettling questions: How was his dad able to apply for and receive a reverse mortgage on his Asheville home when, Drake Jones said, he barely recognized his own son?

What happened to the proceeds of the loan, two payments totaling $74,617, that were wired into his father’s bank account and immediately transferred out? And why was the address on his dad’s bank account changed to a postal box and back to his house after each transfer?

The Asheville Citizen-Times Has Stopped Carrying Our Articles

By JOHN SHORE (May 16, 2022)

Please accept this image as our public testimony and full confession of just how badly we at Asheville Watchdog need a good graphic designer. Almost as much as we need a webmaster. Consider volunteering for us.

Just over two years ago, Asheville Watchdog began its mission of bringing to the citizens of Asheville fair, factual, and reliable in-depth news stories about local government, institutions, issues, and people. And we’ve been doing that ever since.

Rather than compete with local media, we seek to complement and expand the critical services they provide. For this reason we have always offered, free of charge, all of our articles to The Asheville Citizen Times, Blue Ridge Public Radio, Mountain Xpress, and other local publications.

Three months ago, The Asheville Citizen Times (which is owned by Gannett Co., Inc., a subscription-led digitally focused media and marketing solution company that owns hundreds of other media outlets in 46 states across the country) made the decision to stop publishing our articles.

The Watchdog welcomes 2 to news team

By Peter Lewis (May 10, 2022)

The Watchdog welcomes 2 to news team

Asheville Watchdog proudly welcomes reporter Scott Carroll and engagement editor John Shore to our news team.

Scott Carroll, a Report for America corps member, will join Asheville Watchdog June 1 to cover reparations, homelessness, and social justice issues.

An accomplished newspaper reporter and editor, Carroll comes to Asheville from The News-Review in Roseburg, Oregon, where he won five first-place awards in the 2021 Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association contest, including Best Writer and Best Story.

Before that, Carroll worked for 17 years at The Sarasota (Florida) Herald-Tribune. As the Herald-Tribune’s projects editor, his reporting teams won awards from numerous organizations and publications, including Editor & Publisher, Associated Press, American Society of News Editors, Society of Features Journalism, Society of Professional Journalists, Florida Society of News Editors,

The Fall and Rise and Fall of Madison Cawthorn

From “douche crew” leader to Congress to late-night punch line

By TOM FIEDLER (May 6, 2022)

Before the luxury travel, before the payroll padding at taxpayer expense, before the sexually suggestive photos and social-media messaging, they were the “douche crew,” the name 20-year-old Madison Cawthorn gave to himself and his buddies.

Cawthorn assembled his circle of friends as a student at Patrick Henry College in northern Virginia in the fall of 2016, and he remains at the center of its successor pack as the high-profile, far-right, Trump-embraced congressman representing North Carolina’s 11th District, which covers most of the state’s western mountain counties.

Cawthorn was “the ringleader of a cohort of, let’s be honest, rich kids … a group of classmates known as ‘The Douche Crew’,” one schoolmate wrote on the website Medium. The tightly knit gang became well known on campus for frat-boy pranks, for parties at Cawthorn’s off-campus house,

Watchdog Reporter Sally Kestin Wins National Journalism Award

By Asheville Watchdog (April 27, 2022)

Asheville Watchdog won a National Headliner Award honoring the best journalism in the United States in 2021.

Sally Kestin

Equity Erased, a five-part investigative series by reporter Sally Kestin, won third place in investigative reporting for online news sites. First place went to The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates how powerful institutions use technology to change society. The Better Government Association, an Illinois-based watchdog, won second place.

Equity Erased documented how Buncombe County homeowners, many of them elderly and/or Black, lost years and sometimes generations of equity to real estate investor Robert Perry Tucker II. An associate, Lisa K. Roberts, was charged in February with nine felony counts of notarizing an action by fraud or forgery. Her case is pending.

Angered and Dissatisfied, Some Mission Patients Seek Healthcare Elsewhere

Hospital's formerly stellar reputation attracted people to region

By BARBARA DURR (April 15, 2022)

Angered and Dissatisfied, Some Mission Patients Seek Healthcare Elsewhere

They chose Asheville to live out their retirement years, drawn to the area not just for the mountains, the food, and the culture, but also for the safety net of a healthcare system considered one of the best in the country.

The flagship Mission Hospital provided a level of care that helped put Asheville on national lists as one of the top places to retire. One in five Buncombe County residents is now 65 or older. As recently as 2018, for the sixth time in the previous seven years, Mission Health was named one of the nation’s Top 15 Health Systems by IBM Watson Health.

But also in 2018, in a surprise decision, Mission’s board of directors voted to sell the successful nonprofit to HCA Healthcare — the largest for-profit hospital chain in the U.S., with a reputation for cost-cutting and skimping on staff.