After two years working and living in Germany, Carrie and Scott Packard were itching to move back into their four-bed, two-bath Carlsbad home. They just couldn’t wait.

But they had to.

Their tenants, a young professional couple, had trashed the house. Dogs had ripped carpeting and urinated on floors. Garbage was strewn inside and outside. The yard had gone to seed. Although the tenants had signed a lease and passed a credit check, their payments were late, then partial and then, for the last six months, nonexistent.

Worse, they were still living in the Packards’ home and entitled to stay there, unless the Packards could get a court judgment against them.

“We didn’t actually have the legal right to our own home,” Carrie Packard said. “If we moved in, they could sue us for unlawful eviction.”

Squatters made headlines earlier this year, when it was reported that an unauthorized person had quietly moved into a vacant Poway home that was in foreclosure. The story captured attention in large part because the house had been owned by the family of Tony Gwynn, the late Padres outfielder and Baseball Hall of Fame inductee.

Yet people live in homes without the owner’s permission all the time. Happens so often, one courtroom in the San Diego Superior Court — Department 60 — is devoted almost exclusively to these cases.

“We deal with true squatters at a crazy rate,” said Rachael Callahan, a lawyer and owner of San Diego Evictions, a law firm that specializes in representing landlords. “Department 60 will have a morning calendar and an afternoon calendar with 30 to 60 cases, and that’s daily.”

Some cases are settled in the hallway outside the courtroom, often with a quick exchange lawyers have dubbed “cash for keys.” Carrie Packard’s lawyer, for instance, suggested she write a $1,500 check to ensure her tenants’ departure.

“I’m not going to pay them,” she said. “They owe me money.”

The whole process rankled Packard. “There’s no other crime where you could steal this amount of money from people,” she said, “and just walk away.”

The squatter king

In 1967, 16-year-old Richard Branson dropped out of school to become a squatter, moving into a London basement.

This proved to be a temporary detour in a massively successful career. Branson went on to make a multi-billion-dollar fortune in aviation, publishing and other ventures. These days, he owns numerous homes, including the Caribbean’s Necker Island. The entire island.

Around the world, though, many squatters are permanently mired in extreme poverty.

“They are excluded so they take, but they are not seizing an abstract right, they are taking an actual place: a place to lay their heads,” Robert Neuwirth wrote in “Shadow Cities,” a 2004 non-fiction book about squatters in Nairobi. Rio de Janeiro, Instanbul and Mumbai.

“This act — to challenge society’s denial of place by taking one of your own — is an assertion of being in a world that routinely denies people the dignity and the validity inherent in a home.”

In the United States, laws protecting tenants’ rights are rooted in the concept that shelter is a basic human right.

“You are dealing with the roof over somebody’s head,” said Lawrence Mudgett III, a San Diego lawyer who has represented both landlords and tenants.

Most tenant-landlord squabbles are resolved in favor of the property owner. (San Diego Evictions’ Callahan estimates that landlords prevail 98 percent of the time.) But navigating the tangle of federal and state laws is tricky, and even minor errors — a misspelled address, say, or the wrong date on a filing — can trip up an inexperienced plaintiff.

“The frustration often comes,” Mudgett said, “because people who may be morally, ethically right make a legal misstep.”

Squatters are defined as people who illegally enter empty residences and stay for a night, a week, a month, longer. This often happens in the wake of foreclosures, like those that hit San Diego in large numbers before and during the Great Recession.

“I can’t tell you the number of times I would go into a home and see that the stoves had been stolen, the copper wiring ripped out of the walls,” said Robert Weichelt, a San Diego real estate agent. “They would steal anything they could. They’d leave all their trash.”

Weichelt’s colleagues also talk about a woman who drives a late model Lexus around La Jolla, scouting out the latest and greatest properties on the market.

“She finds out which homes are vacant and will swim in the pool or take a shower there or even a nap,” said Greg Noonan, a La Jolla real estate agent. “She is a professional vacant home schmoozer.”

There are even squatters who treat the home as if they own it — for good reason.

“Sometimes the squatters are the ex-borrowers themselves,” said John Allen, who runs San Diego’s Action Foreclosure.

Case in point: In 2007, a bank foreclosed on Andrew Karsh’s four-bedroom El Cajon home. Karsh filed suit and fought to retain possession of his home, extending his residency there by more than a decade until his eviction in July 2018.

“Even though they foreclosed, I was still there,” he said. “I am the king of squatters.”

Judgment is entered

It’s 1:30 p.m. in Department 60. In the minutes before Judge Tamila Ipema enters, hurried conversations swirl around the courtroom.

Lawyer to client: “Don’t bring that stuff up until they bring it up.”

Lawyer to another client: “Don’t worry. You’re in the catbird seat.”

Lawyer to opposing counsel: “If you want to handle this in bankruptcy court, be my guest!”

The 23 cases on the afternoon docket don’t involve “squatters.” in the legal sense, as lawyers see “squatters” as someone who surreptitiously occupies an empty domicile. Everything in Department 60 this day is a “tenancy at will” or “unlawful detainer” case, landlords seeking to remove now-unwelcome tenants or guests.

“You let Uncle James stay on your couch, and then he stays,” said Callahan, the San Diego Evictions owner. “That is actually tenancy at will. Someone let him in.”

Ipema takes the bench. A half dozen stipulations — agreements that have been hashed out between landlord and tenant — are dispensed with, each requiring 60 seconds flat.

A tenant who allegedly stopped paying rent in December doesn’t show for trial. Ipema rules for the landlord.

New trial dates are swiftly set for a batch of cases.

Every case is unique, of course, but in Department 60 some themes are in heavy rotation. A roommate moves out and the remaining party can’t afford the rent. Tenants withhold a portion of rent after an unexpected rental increase. Or, in one particular case, to protest a condo was a.) roach-infested, b.) equipped with broken appliances, and c.) generally unfit for human habitation.

“Anything else you want to show me?” Ipema asks. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

“I’m not trying to live somewhere and not pay,” the tenant replies. “That’s not the issue, that’s never the issue. I kept paying my portion.”

The property manager counters with receipts — repairs to the condo’s dishwasher and refrigerator, a series of fumigations and replacement of a broken door.

“Judgment is entered for the plaintiff,” Ipema says.

‘Such a mess’

Trying to retrieve their Carlsbad home, the Packards received a crash course in Eviction Law 101.

First, they had to mail a demand notice to the tenants at their last known address — which, of course, was the address of the Packards’ home.

The tenants had 18 days to respond. “Like so much of the process,” Carrie Packard said, “this just doesn’t make sense. Why do you have to wait 18 days when they haven’t paid rent in six months?”

If there’s no response and the tenants haven’t left, a “summons and complaint” is issued, filing the lawsuit.

If the tenants don’t come to court to contest the case, a default judgment is entered for the landlord. If the tenant shows up, the trial takes place — unless the judge agrees to continue the case while evidence or witnesses are assembled.

Even if the judge rules for the landlord, the standoff can drag on. “You’re going to get your property back,” Callahan said, “but that doesn’t happen the day of the trial.”

Instead, the court has to process the paperwork and issue a writ of execution, instructing the sheriff’s department to post a notice on the home, alerting the tenants that an eviction will take place on a given date.

“Your squatter,” Callahan said, “is entitled to a minimum of five days notice before the lockout.”

On the appointed day, a deputy clears the building of people and a locksmith changes the locks. The owners are able to move back in, but their responsibilities are not over. Personal items left in the residence must be stored for up to 15 days, so the former resident can retrieve them.

“This squatter who had no right to be in your property can come back and sue you for damaging their property,” Callahan said.

The entire process can stretch to 24 weeks. The Packards’ case ended much sooner, when their delinquent tenants abruptly vacated the Carlsbad house, apparently after receiving the demand notice.

The owners moved back on Feb. 18. Then the cleanup began.

“It looked like hoarders had been in here,” Carrie Packard said. “Such a mess.”

They hauled out garbage, cleaned various surfaces — Carlsbad Police assured them the odd reddish stain found around doorways is not dried blood — scrubbed, repainted, paid $10,000 for new carpeting and flooring.

More work remains to be done, but the Packards don’t seem to mind. Home is where the heart, and the demand notice, is.