92-year-old fights to keep family home, property in Lumby, B.C., after being sued by developer

Doreen Koch never thought she'd be spending the last years of her life fighting a court battle to hold onto her family home.

"I'm not getting any younger," said the 92-year-old woman, speaking from the kitchen table of her decades-old family home in Lumby, B.C., a 90-minute drive northeast of Kelowna.

Koch is being sued by a North Vancouver developer, who says her son agreed to sell him the 10-acre property in the B.C. Interior that has been in their family for over 80 years. 

Koch and her family say they've spent over $100,000 fighting the lawsuit over the last three years.

According to a lawsuit filed in March 2021 in Vancouver Supreme Court, Koch's late son, Collin Jenkins, entered into a contract of purchase and sale, to sell the land to Matthew Timothy Wilson for $475,000.

Court documents identify Wilson as "a businessperson who resides in North Vancouver."

The lawsuit alleges that on July 10, 2020, Wilson entered into a contract of purchase and sale with Koch and Jenkins, to sell the property to Wilson.

In her response to the lawsuit, Koch says her son agreed to sell the property without her knowledge or consent, a decision she still doesn't fully understand.

"I don't know [why he did it]," she said. "But it's hard to condemn someone."

Koch, in her response to the lawsuit, also says her son suffered from end-stage liver disease in the months leading up to the sale contract, and had "impaired cognition resulting from hepatic encephalopathy."

Colin Jenkins died on Aug. 11, 2020, barely a month after the lawsuit alleges the contract was signed.

According to Wilson's lawsuit, Jenkins had claimed he was authorized to make the sale because his mother had given him power of attorney.

Koch admits she executed a power of attorney naming Jenkins, her only child, as her primary attorney.

However, she says she stored the document in her safety deposit box so that it could not be used without her authorization, and that Jenkins didn't have a copy or access to the original.