The Lawyer Burying America’s ‘Living Dead’

By Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek

One morning in the fall of 2013, Ignacio Jimenez said goodbye to his family and left their home in Sierra Vista, Ariz. He would never be heard from again.

At the time, the family had been suffering through a rough patch financially. Ignacio, 31, had been furloughed from his full-time job, through a government contractor, as a plumber at Fort Huachuca, a U.S. Army installation in southeast Arizona. He and his wife, Alicia, had six children. Without his paycheck, they quickly fell behind on their mortgage payments.

To stave off foreclosure, Alicia would later testify ...