Process Serving - Stories On The Job (US)
February 23, 2015 | Security
Kill the messenger -- or at least wave a shotgun, let loose your pit bulls, throw eggs or give chase in a golf cart.
That`s the attitude process servers expect from the people to whom they deliver news, in the form of legal documents, that they are being sued or sought for questioning as witnesses in civil actions.
`You get all types of strange situations,` said Jim Hegarty, a retired sheriff`s lieutenant turned private investigator, who is a dean of process servers in Palm Beach County and has even written a guidebook about it. `But you can talk your way out of almost every situation.`
Hegarty, whose private investigation firm includes his wife, Gail, daughter, B.J., and daughter-in-law, Teresa, has served process for about 10 years. Between them, they have been threatened with guns, foul language and pit bull terriers, but none has gotten hurt, although B.J. Hegarty was once pinned in a slammed door.
Hegarty also has been chased by a man in a golf cart, has had her car egged and has received dozens of propositions from men she has served with divorce petitions.
The man with the eggs later denied being served, so her father went the next time with a camera.
`He said, `Take a picture of this,`` and pulled down his pants and bent over, Hegarty said.
`It`s not often that you get the guy who moons you,` he said.
But that picture held up in court as being enough to identify the man and to prove he had been served, Hegarty said.
Another time, B.J. was supposed to serve a subpoena for deposition to a man who had witnessed a traffic accident.
`He`s a maintenance man at a golf course, so here I go trekking along in high heels,` she said. `And he ends up trying to run me over with a golf cart trying to give me back the subpoena.`
Until October, when state law changed, the Hegartys served process on a case- by-case basis, appointed as needed by judges.
In October, the law enabled the chief Circuit Court judge to appoint a pool of people to serve process, augmenting the staff of deputies in the Sheriff`s Office Civil Division. The court-appointed process servers are more flexible than sheriff`s deputies who don`t have time for stakeouts and can`t leave the county.
The new system is more efficient for attorneys and judges.
The Investigators Investigations offer professional, prompt, and competitively priced process serving to all of our clients. Call us on 0800 747 633.
`It`s good for us because we don`t have to appoint elisors all the time,` County Judge Michael Gersten said. `And for an attorney, it was a pain in the neck, having to file a pleading, then go to a judge.`
Last week, about 100 people who had taken a seminar and passed a test were sworn in as process servers, bringing the total number in the pool to about 230.
`You are officers of the court now,`` Chief Judge Daniel T.K. Hurley told them in the proceeding, ``and we`re delighted so many of you have joined in the program.`
Many of them, like Hegarty, already had been doing it as court-appointed process servers before the law changed.
Donna Belzer of Boca Raton started serving process to supplement her private-eye work and got her husband, Bruce, a teacher, involved, too.
`One night we got a baby sitter and went out together for fun,` she said.
Elaine Yanow of Fort Lauderdale branched into process serving after working for years as a legal secretary. `I wanted to be on the outside,` she said of the decision. Later, her daughter, Jody, joined her.
The stories process servers tell are not all funny. One man committed suicide after B.J. Hegarty served him with a divorce petition. Another person was killed after being served with a subpoena for a deposition as a witness, Hegarty said.
Dealing with the reactions of those people being served is the easy part of process serving, most say. The hard part, they say, is finding them, getting to them and then being sure that they are the ones sought.
`People go to a lot of effort not to be served,` Hegarty said. `They do all sorts of weird things. They sail off in boats, they run like hell, and once a guy swam a canal, but the deputy who was serving him just dropped the papers on the bank and said, `You`re served.``
Contrary to some people`s belief, you don`t have to accept a subpoena or summons and you don`t have to be touched by the process server. And a family member older than 18 can accept for someone who lives in the same house.
Hegarty once chased a woman to Anchorage, Alaska, and made `several thousand dollars` for serving her with a divorce petition. He found her with another man in `the most expensive hotel in town.`
He`d `rather not say` who she was.
B.J. and Gail Hegarty once chased an elderly woman who spoke only Lithuanian. They worked for months trying to serve her and her daughter with notice that they were being sued by another daughter seeking to have her mother declared incompetent. The plaintiff claimed that her sister was selling off all her mother's assets, contrary to the mother`s will.
Finally, at a house in Lake Worth, B.J. and Gail Hegarty walked up and saw through a screen door a little old woman sitting inside. When they spoke to her, she didn`t understand them and called for her daughter, who walked to the door and slammed it on B.J.
`I was literally pinned in the door. It scared the living hell out of me,` she said.
Gail Hegarty pushed the door open to free her daughter, who then handed the papers to the woman.
`She ripped them in half,` B.J. Hegarty said, `and then I said it was time to leave.`
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