POWAY (CBS 8) - Earlier this week, a couple was arrested for stealing furniture from a Poway home after they were evicted. The rightful owners now have their furniture back, but don't want anything to do with the pieces that were returned.
Linda Oleson and her husband are using their friend's home for an estate sale. They say they're doing this to try and make up for the more than $100,000 they lost at the hands of a pair of con artists.
"It's been a nightmare. It's been horrible. It strips you of everything. It's like it strips your soul," Linda said.
This all started back in December of 2010, when the Olesons put their Poway home on the market. That's when they agreed to sell it to Arthur Lewis and Christine Moe.
The couple asked if they could move in before escrow closed and pay rent, which they did. But the escrow never went through. Despite efforts to get them out, they stayed before they were forcibly evicted nearly a year later. They took all of the Oleson's furniture with them. Authorities finally caught up with the couple this week and arrested them for grand theft.
"You know what the moral is? I wish we would have put our house on the market two months before we did before the market crashed and we probably would have gotten it sold. But why we had to walk through this path, lose everything… now we're having an estate sale. I've never even been to an estate sale, so I'm just trying to figure it out," Linda said.
Linda says she and her husband tried did everything by the book. They had an agent, they had all the correct paperwork, but they still became victims.
The estate sale is Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 18781 Heritage Drive in Poway.