A Villager has been declared a “vexatious litigant” in a fierce battle over a dead man’s home.
The battle over the home at 611 Juanita Court in the Village of De La Vista North led to the arrest Jan. 13 of 71-year-old Sooksiri Rittirucksa. When a Sumter County deputy, responding to a trespassing complaint, arrived at the home, Rittirucksa claimed it was “her house” and she had been “unlawfully evicted,” stating that the Sumter County judge who signed the eviction order was “a crook and a fraud.” She said it was her intention to move back in. She admitted she had contacted a locksmith and had the locks changed. The house was searched and the previous locks could not be found. She was arrested on charges of burglary and theft and remains free on $1,000 bond.
This past week in Sumter County Court, the parties representing the ownership in the home successfully had Rittirucksa declared a “vexatious litigant” due to the “multitude of frivolous and irrelevant” documents she has filed in the case.
“Based upon the abuse of the court process, the Clerk of Court was ordered not to accept any further filings from Plaintiff without a Florida Bar Licensed Attorney signing off on said filings,” Circuit Judge Kristie Healis wrote this past week.
Rittirucksa has acted as her own attorney. Court transcripts show that while she appears to have a keen understanding of the court process and a knack for slowing things down, at other times the native of Thailand has professed a language barrier when ordered in plain English by a court hearing officer to “move” out of the house.
The home had been purchased by William Bartlam Lowe in 2006. A decade later, Rittirucksa’s name was added to the title. It is not clear what the nature of the relationship was between Rittirucksa and Lowe, who apparently died in 2017.
His death appears to have set in motion a protracted legal battle between Rittirucksa and the heirs to the Lowe estate. Legal documents infer that she resisted efforts to move out of the home and that she attempted to sabotage its sale, even though she was clearly promised 50 percent of the proceeds of the sale.
