Latasha Chairse said she believed she was on the cusp of homeownership, her mystifying story goes.

In early 2023, the cafeteria worker and her three kids moved into a house on Key Street in south Jackson after a bad experience with a prior landlord. The keys were in the doorknob, so Chairse said she walked right in and got to work cleaning the dusty home, repainting and installing a new water heater. 

“I treated this house like it was my home,” she said. “Like it was one of my children.” 

There was just one problem. It was never Chairse’s home. 

Last week, the 37-year-old pregnant, single mother became the first person in Jackson expelled from a dwelling under a new state law called the Real Property Owners Protection Act, said a Jackson Police Department captain whose team served the order to vacate. A municipal court judge declared her a squatter. 

Chairse says she believed she was living in a state-owned, tax-forfeited property. But she ended up in court after the home’s true owners, Key Street Trust, filed an affidavit for her removal. The trust had owned the home since 2008 and was hoping to sell it to a prospective buyer who would not purchase the property while Chairse occupied it, said Dallis Ketchum, a local real estate agent and the property manager. 

Ketchum said he had tried to tell Chairse that she was squatting, but Chairse insisted the home was hers.

“I don’t know that she actually understood what she was doing at all, but frankly, that’s unknown to me,” he said. “It’s a peculiar situation.”

Ketchum and a local attorney for the trust, Stephen Younger, could have filed eviction proceedings in Hinds County Justice Court, but Ketchum said they weren’t confident in that process.

“What’s most difficult is not necessarily getting it through the court,” Ketchum said of eviction proceedings. “It’s getting a constable to ever call you back.” 

They decided to wait to take action until the new law, designed to make these removals swifter than an eviction, went into effect earlier this year. Under the new process, the owner filed an affidavit with the Jackson Police Department. Police served her with the citation, giving Chairse three days to contest the eviction in court, which she did. Jackson Municipal Court Judge Jeff Reynolds could have ordered Chairse out of the home within 24 hours by law but decided to give her 10 days. 

Chairse’s last day in the home is this Thursday. 

In an interview, Chairse listed several reasons why she believed the property was available. She said a man in a white truck outside the house next door told her that Key Street house was owned by the state. 

Chairse said she then went downtown in early 2023 and spoke to a woman in the Hinds County Tax Collector’s Office who told her that no one had paid taxes on the home since 2008, which is false, according to county records.

“I had told her that the house was abandoned and I was trying to see how I could get the house,” Chairse said. 

Chairse claimed the woman advised her that the home could become hers if she moved in and paid three years of taxes — an incorrect description of Mississippi’s tax forfeiture process and advice that a Hinds County Tax Collector’s Office employee said the office would not give. 

Chairse said she paid $21 to get a copy of the deed, certified in 2008, then left, believing she could continue to live there and eventually become the homeowner. 

“It was going to be under my name once I paid,” she said. 

A year or so after Charise moved in, a man knocked on her door. It was Ketchum. He told her that she was squatting and she had to leave. Chairse showed him the deed, complete with the name of the owner: Key Street Trust.

“It’s the deed that my owner had. And that was what was so perplexing to everyone,” Ketchum said. “It’s just a copy of the deed. That’s all.” 

Chairse had scrawled her name on the deed for good measure, as if it were a car title. 

“I just ended up signing it to keep people from trying to get it from me, cause I ain’t trust the man that came over there,” she said. 

Chairse’s understanding of the process through which she could obtain the home lacked a key element: Mississippi’s tax sale, which occurs when an owner fails to pay property taxes on time. 

In fact, the Key Street home went to a tax sale in 2024 after Randall Martin, a beneficiary and owner of the trust, failed to pay the prior year’s taxes on time. An investment company scooped up the tax lien to the home. Chairse was none the wiser.

The tax sale does not transfer ownership of the home. The original owner can maintain their right to the home if the back due taxes are paid — or “redeemed” — within two years. 

Martin redeemed his ownership of the home on Jan. 23, 2025, paying the 2023 taxes he had missed, according to Hinds County Chancery Court records. Chairse claimed she paid one year of taxes on the home, but this is not reflected in the county’s records and would not have earned her any interest in the home had she paid.

Ketchum said it is very common for owners of investment properties to forget to pay taxes on time, because most homeowners are accustomed to the escrow attached to their monthly mortgage payment covering that duty each year. He added that he was hesitant to talk to the media about what happened in case Chairse was portrayed as “the victim.” 

“The victim is the property owner,” Ketchum said. “He did not have control of what he owned because he had a trespasser living in it.” 

Chairse, who stopped working in the final months of her pregnancy, said she purchased a new water heater for the home. For this, the judge gave her a break, rejecting the financial judgment that Key Street Trust was seeking for attorney’s fees.

The mother said she was in a desperate situation before she moved into the Key Street house. She claimed the water heater had broken at the home where she had been living and the landlord tried to make her pay to replace it.

“I look at it like it was a blessing,” she said of finding the house on Key Street. “I ain’t got no rent to pay. The only thing I got to pay is my utility and take care of my children. I said, ‘That’s all I need.’” 

Earlier this year, Chairse said she visited the Hinds County’s administrative offices in an attempt to pay taxes she believed she owed, only to learn they’d already been paid. 

“And I said it must’ve been God, then.” 

She’s not sure yet where she’ll end up now.