The Bank of New York Mellon v. Mazzeo

Syllabus

The plaintiff bank, M Co., sought to foreclose a mortgage on certain real property owned by the defendants J and L. At trial, the court denied the motion for judgment filed by J and L, which was based on their claim that M Co. failed to make out a prima facie case because a condition precedent to foreclosure, namely, notice of default prior to acceleration, had not been proven. The trial court rendered a judgment of foreclosure by sale, from which J and L appealed to this court. Held: 1. J and L could not prevail on their claim that M Co. lacked standing, which was based on their claim that M Co. failed to establish that it was the holder of the note when it commenced the present action: M Co.'s production of the original note at trial, as well as the admission into evidence of the copy of the note through H, a litigation manager for B Co., the subservicer for the loan securing M Co.'s mortgage to J and L's property, raised a presumption that M Co. was the holder of the note, and it then became the burden of J and L to rebut that presumption in order to challenge M Co.'s right to enforce the note, which they failed to do; moreover, even though J and L claimed that the court improperly admitted into evidence the routing history of the loan, that evidence was not necessary to prove that M Co. was a holder of the note, as M Co. produced the note, which was endorsed in blank, and, thus, the challenge by J and L to the admission of the routing history, even if valid, did not rebut the presumption that M Co. owned the debt when this action commenced. 2. The trial court improperly concluded that M Co. proved its prima facie foreclosure case: even though J and L could not prevail on their claim that M Co. did not demonstrate that it was the owner of the debt, M Co. did not prove that all conditions precedent to foreclosure, as established by the note and mortgage, had been satisfied, specifically, M Co. did not demonstrate that it provided J and L with notice of default, as