A 90-year-old woman on the verge of being kicked out of her home due to an illegal foreclosure is safe after a judge stopped an eviction hours before it was to take effect.  

Early Tuesday morning, the front yard of Ramona Garcia's home in Pharr was filled with furniture and other household items.

Garcia's family said constables enforced a court order after an eviction notice was served stating that the 90-year-old had 24 hours to leave her home. 

Though Garcia says she has never been behind on rent, attorney Juan Angel Guerra says the home Garcia lives in was foreclosed after the owner passed away.

"What happened, in this case, is that the house belonged to a Miss Huff and they foreclosed on her house, but the problem is that she was deceased when they foreclosed," Guerra said. 

According to Guerra, the foreclosure on Huff's property was illegal. He says, in some cases, banks don't see that a person is deceased, only that payments are missed.

"When a person dies and owns a house, in order for the bank or anyone to foreclose, they have to go through an estate and get permission from an estate," Guerra said. "They just can't foreclose on a dead person. And this happens a lot."

In Garcia's case, after the owner of her home died, the owner's children rented out the house without knowing a situation like this could happen.

After several hours, a judge signed an order to stop the eviction.

Family members who initially gather together to help move Garcia's furniture out of her house cheered as they learned that she no longer had to leave her home.

Whether the bank knew if the original owner was deceased or not is unclear.