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For Richard Castaldo, the fight to keep his home out of foreclosure is only the latest in a life that has been full of extraordinary challenges. When he was 17, Castaldo became one of the first students shot during the Columbine High School massacre. Now, he's turned to Occupy Los Angeles to overcome this latest obstacle:

Richard Castaldo has a bullet permanently lodged in his spine from when, at 17 years old, he was shot eight times by two peers at Columbine High School.

Castaldo and his friend, Rachel Scott, were sitting outside during their lunch break on April 20, 1999, when fellow students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold began shooting. Richard and Rachel were the first students hit.

“They shot us both pretty much at the same time. It was all kind of one big spray,” Castaldo said.

He remembers waiting, bleeding for more than half an hour. Before help could arrive, Klebold and Harris returned.

“During that time I heard Rachel crying, and they came back and shot her in the head and I knew she was dead after that,” Castaldo said.

Confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life as a result of the shooting, Richard moved to Los Angeles five years ago to pursue a career in music, only to fall behind on mortgage payments for his condo.Now he hopes Occupy Los Angeles can help him find a way to stay in the city he now calls home.

“I feel like they’re really the only group that doesn’t have an ulterior motive,” said Castaldo, who admits he “should have known better” than to believe the value of his condominium would go up. Roughly 36,000 California housing units received a foreclosure filing in October, according to RealtyTrac.

Time may be running out for Castaldo, as the condo is set to be sold at auction on December 6. But given other successes Occupy groups have had saving homeowners threatened by foreclosure, he may still stand a chance. Over the summer, Occupy Our Homes -- an offshoot of the Occupy movement -- saved the home of a Minneapolis woman and helped another resident of that city resist foreclosure in the same month.

There's also The Home Defender's League who are quite successful at what they do, and they also have quite a few partner organizations -- some affiliated with the Occupy movement, some not -- even in California.

Richard won't be alone in this fight, and he's in good hands.

I'll update with any new developments.

This may well be a new low for a bank. On the morning of October 10, 2012, Niko Black was in bed when her front door was kicked open by the Orange County Sheriff's Department. Black, who has terminal cancer, crawled to her wheelchair as four-to-six deputies entered and proceeded to hold a gun to her face. She was then taken outside without any of her medication. When she called the Garden Grove Police, they did nothing. Since all of her medication and other means of treatment were in her home, Black began to have difficulty breathing, and very quickly and had to be taken to the hospital.

Via:

The 37-year-old Mescalero Apache woman, who suffers from a rare, malignant and metastatic form of cancer, refused to open the door, saying that they had no legal right to be there. On the other side was a taped copy of a court order obtained from Federal Bankruptcy Judge Theodore C. Albert in late August that she firmly believes should have prevented the OCSD from carrying out the eviction. The deputies acted anyway.

"They break down my door," Black recounts. "I'm sitting there in my wheel chair. I'm about 100 pounds of shriveled-up cancer and a threat to no one."

What came next, she says, was much more harrowing. "Sergeant Bob Sima puts a gun to my face, finger on the trigger, no safety and walks around me," Black states, pausing to emotionally gather herself. "There's no reason, except for to threaten my life, for an intimidation factor, to put a gun to my head."

With neighbors lining up outside watching, Black's health began to worsen. "I needed my medication, I couldn't breathe and I was having a seizure," she said, claiming that deputies were unresponsive to concerns about her condition; one officer even remarked that she 'looked good' to him. An ambulance finally arrived at her friend's behest and she was forcibly removed from her home and hospitalized.

If this situation weren't complicated enough, according to an online petition circulating in support of Black, she never even had a mortgage with Wells Fargo!

Since the eviction, Federal Judge Theodore C. Albert (who signed the court order favoring Black) has ordered Wells Fargo and county representatives to appear in court on November 13 to explain the eviction.