LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - On September 15, 2004, the clock was ticking on Lelon DeWitt’s life and his subprime loan.

When the transmission repairman underwent open-heart surgery, he told his mortgage broker he didn’t want a housing loan that was in the works.

"I didn’t know if I was going to be dead or alive," DeWitt later recounted.

But the mortgage broker, Troy Musick of Wholesale Mortgage Co., was so eager to clinch the deal, he followed the couple into the hospital, said DeWitt’s wife, Ruth DeWitt.

As a surgeon cracked Mr. DeWitt’s chest open for a quadruple heart bypass, the broker approached her in the waiting room of Elkhart General Hospital in Elkhart, Indiana.

"It’s now or never," she remembers him saying.

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