Serial bankruptcy filings and an 11th-hour motion could not save five properties from the gavel
A Delaware court has confirmed the sheriff sale of five properties after a borrower's bankruptcy filings and last-minute motions failed to stop the foreclosure.
The ruling, handed down on April 8, 2027, closes the book on a foreclosure fight that dragged on for more than four years and shows just how far some borrowers will go to delay the inevitable, and how courts eventually run out of patience.
Here is how it unfolded. Back in July 2021, Kina Lane Enterprises borrowed $150,000 from World Business Lenders. The loan was secured by a package of five residential properties, with Kina Lane Whitfield signing on as guarantor. The payments stopped, and by December 2022, the lender was in Delaware Superior Court looking to enforce the mortgage. A default judgment followed, and the New Castle County Sheriff was directed to sell the properties.
That is when the delays started piling up. A sale scheduled for August 2023 was stayed. A second sale in November 2023 was postponed after Whitfield wired $20,000 to the lender the day before and asked to keep negotiating. Then the lender discovered that another entity, Goldsby Enterprises, had been added to the deeds of four of the five parcels, which meant more paperwork and more delay.
In March 2024, the loan was assigned to One Pie Investment LLC, which stepped in as plaintiff and secured another default judgment. A sale was set for August 13, 2024. The day before, Whitfield filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, freezing everything until that case was dismissed in April 2025. A week later, her two affiliated companies filed for Chapter 11, freezing things again until those cases were dismissed in June 2025.
The sheriff finally held the sale on August 12, 2025. At 4:55 p.m. the day before, Whitfield filed yet another emergency motion to stop it. The sale went ahead anyway, and One Pie bought all five properties as a package for $380,000.
Whitfield then asked the court to set the sale aside, arguing the price was far too low. She put the fair market value at $839,000 using appraisals and comparable sales, and said the properties should have been valued individually, not as a package. One Pie pointed to the 2025 New Castle County tax reassessment, the county's first in more than 40 years, which valued the properties at $753,300. One Pie also noted that Whitfield herself had described two of the properties as having squatters and being uninhabitable, which cut against her higher figure.
Judge Sean P. Lugg ran the numbers through Delaware's so-called 50 percent test, which can set aside a sale if the price comes in below half of fair market value. Since the properties had been mortgaged together as a package, the court valued them the same way. At $380,000, the sale price landed at 50.4 percent of the county's $753,300 valuation, just clearing the line. The court found nothing shocking about that number.
Whitfield raised other arguments too, including claims of deceptive payoff negotiations, bad faith, attorney misconduct, and insufficient notice to her and her tenants. The court was not persuaded. She had been personally served, received certified mail with the complaint and summons, and sale notices had been posted on the properties. The judge also pointed out that her repeated last-minute filings showed she clearly knew the sales were coming.
In the end, the court granted One Pie's motion to confirm the sale and denied Whitfield's motion to set it aside. For lenders and servicers watching from the sidelines, the takeaway is familiar but worth repeating: serial bankruptcy filings and eleventh-hour motions can slow a foreclosure down, but they do not always stop it, and courts will eventually call time.
