CHICAGO — Dee McConnell remembers her mother, Mae Ella Dunn, waking up at 5 a.m., taking the bus to her factory job and saving her wages to buy a house. In 1995, Dunn moved her family from the Cabrini-Green public housing development to their new home in the Austin neighborhood.
But today, the home Dunn labored to buy no longer belongs to her children.
Before Dunn passed away about five years ago at the age of 89, she commissioned contractor Mark Diamond to repair her home. But Dunn suffered from dementia, and she didn’t realize Diamond had misled her into signing papers that added debt to her house through what’s called a reverse mortgage.
McConnell asked her mother why she didn’t have the agreement reviewed by someone else first, McConnell recounted. The two then had a tense conversation, but “she was so just enamored with Mark Diamond,” McConnell said. “He was the epitome of a con man, so it was hard to tell her anything at that point.”…