A WOMAN has been through four years of court proceedings and two major disappointments after the entirety of her safe deposit box disappeared from the bank.
In 2016, Jennifer Williams Morsch was shocked when worth of her belongings was nowhere to be found after having stored them in a safe deposit box.
The safe contained rare, collectible gold coins, family heirlooms, jewelry and cash which she had last stored in 2012, reported the .
Morsch used her safe key, as always, to stash away gold coins for safekeeping.
She had been using the contents of the safe to save up for her daughter’s college tuition, but when she returned years later, she was shocked and dismayed.
The mother checked the safe box in 2016, to remove funds for her daughter’s tuition, but her key did not fit.
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When she brought the issue to the bank’s attention, they said that the box had been moved to the 64-box slot.
Once again, her key did not fit box 64 either.
With both Morsch and the bank baffled, they called a locksmith to drill out the lock on the box so she could access her belongings.
He arrived at the bank a few days after she first tried to open the box, and when the locksmith finally gained access, Morsch could not believe what she saw.
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“I went into a state of shock because in that moment, like in a hurricane or a flood, that part of my life was wiped away,” said Morsch, crying.
The devastated woman went on to insist the bank let her into the place where her box was originally located.
According to the Chase branch, she required a to gain access since their paperwork showed that the box was rented to another person in 2012.
Nearly two years later, in 2018, she returned to the branch and they drilled into the lock of where her original box was.
Upon feeling the weight of the box in that slot, she was hopeful.
“Oh my goodness my things are still here, this is my box,” Morsch recalled thinking.
But that hope was short-lived when she opened the box and found none of her lost items inside.
“My interpretation was, now I got my answer: My things are gone,” Morsch said.
“And things don’t walk out of a box, somebody has removed them.”
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Amid the safe box debacle, Morsch filed a lawsuit against the bank for $500,000 in damages for losing her items.
Her representing attorney Andres Beregovich believed that the 2018 access to her original safe box slot only further strengthened Morsch’s case.
“After Jennifer went to the branch last week, it shows that those procedures that were supposed to be in place, none of them were actually followed,” he said.
“In 2016, they told [Morsch] that box was not yours and last week they drilled that box.”
Some of the items Morsch estimated collecting were $20,000 in gold coins, $40,000 in cash, and thousands more in diamond, ruby, and sapphire jewelry.
‘SERENDIPITY STRUCK’
In November of 2018, Chase tried to have the case against them thrown out but a judge denied their motion and set a court date for January 2019.
The trial did not go in Morsch’s direction as the judge ruled in favor of Chase and did not award her the damages she sought.
This ruling came as “a matter of law,” meaning that the judge in the case found that she had insufficient evidence to back her claims.
Four months after receiving the disappointing verdict, Morsch was shocked to find her belongings in an auction.
“Serendipity struck,” reads a from an appeals court, describing how a friend of Morsch’s saw an ad for Florida’s Division of Unclaimed Property auction where a four-carat diamond necklace was featured.
Morsch’s friend recognized the necklace to be one of the distraught mother’s belongings and notified her.
Chase’s statements to the district court ultimately turned out to be false.”
Morsch v. JP Morgan Chase (2020)
She quickly called the division and was allowed to recover the necklace along with every other missing piece from her safe deposit box.
“I asked them if I could go back and hold it,” she recalled to local CBS news affiliate .
“I wanted to see it with my own eyes.”
She received a box in the mail with the rest of her belongings a few days after she verified her necklace ownership.
“I can’t believe it,” she said looking through the box.
“I’m looking for my wedding ring.”
BACK TO COURT AGAIN
The quick-thinking Chase client then filed a Freedom of Information Act Request and found out that the bank had surrendered the items of her safe box to Florida State on September 11, 2012.
This discovery caused Morsch to file an appeal of her original court decision on the grounds that Chase committed fraud in court by stating they were unaware of the location of her belongings.
She was denied her motion by a district court, so she escalated the request to an appellate court.
“Ultimately, my client went through emotional torture,” her attorney Beregovich said.
“If it happened to Jenny Morsch, then it surely had to have happened to someone else, and the world needs to know about this.”
Once again, the court system did not provide her luck as they agreed with the district court decision to deny her motion, reaffirming that she did not have the evidence necessary to prove that Chase Bank knowingly and intentionally committed fraud in court.
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“Morsch fails to show fraud on the court by clear and convincing evidence, and the district court did not abuse its discretion in so holding,” reads the decision.
“In particular, though Chase’s statements to the district court ultimately turned out to be false, Morsch has shown neither that Chase intentionally fabricated evidence nor that one of its attorneys was implicated in such a fraud.”
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