My Story and Why I Want to Fix Society (2 of 2)

Now before I begin, make sure you ready the first part of this, otherwise it’ll be a little confusing. Did you read it? Okay, good. Now, after that terrible year of 2008 was finally approaching the end, the worst part of my story was just about to begin. It was Christmas Eve Day (12/24/08) and it was unusually snowy day; we had about 2 or 3 feet, yes feet, of snow on the ground. It was 11 o’clock in the morning and my dad and I were going to do some last minute Christmas shopping for my mom. We had to hurry because I had to be home by 1 to meet my friends to go sledding. We were running late and finally got back to the house at about 1:15 pm. When we were approaching the house, I smelt a strange smell but though nothing of it. But I should have. When we opened the door, the house was pitch black and you could hear a faint, distorted beeping in the back of the house. The house was filled with smoke. And then when I looked down, I saw the most horrifying thing that will forever be ingrained in my head. My 2 year old beagle named Buddy was laying by the front door dead. His paws were bloody from scratching the door for dear life and was covered in his own vomit and excrement from the stress of smoke inhalation.

Me being in complete shock, my dad said to go get help while he rushed in to try to save our other beagle. We had no cell phones at the time so I had to find a house where I could call 911. Running through the thick snow with tears rushing down my face, it took 8 houses until we found someone that would help. I stayed in their house watching my dad trying to resuscitate my other dead beagle through the window. Eventually the fire department came and told us that the fire was caused by a surge protector in the basement and burned so hot and so fast that it melted and destroyed everything downstairs, sucked all of the oxygen out of the house, and put itself out. They also said it started a couple minutes after we had left and if we had come home when we were supposed to, the fire would have back-drafted and killed us both once we opened the door. We were homeless on Christmas Eve. All of our Christmas decorations were burnt and covered with smoke. There was a priceless ornament that I had got from my favorite teacher in the world who died of cancer 2 years after I was in her class that was destroyed. Things I would never get back, like my dogs. My dogs were incredibly important to me and I loved them dearly. Now every time Christmas comes around, I will never be able to stop thinking about that day. That image of my dog will never go away. However, this nightmare is far from over. We had to live in a hotel for 5 weeks out of our own expense because the Red Cross wouldn't pay for it after the first week. And then were forced to move into a rental house that was twice as expensive as our house was but wasn't bigger.

The insurance company wouldn't go into the house for three weeks, so everything that might of been salvageable was destroyed. At a quarter way through our belongings, they said we hit our cap and wouldn't pay for the rest of our things. My dad had about 30 vintage arcade games in the basement including Pac-man, Donkey Kong, Centipede, etc. that we would never get back. But it didn't stop there. They told us that they would pay for our dogs to be put in a garbage bag and thrown in the dump.They also took the surge protector that had caused all of this and had it destroyed without being scientifically tested. Finally we hired a contractor to come in and they ordered a big dumpster for us to itemize our belongings because the insurance company wouldn't do it. With the temperature outside being about 15 degrees, we had made a system of using a mattress to separate the garbage from the salvageable things including all of our photo albums and birth certificates. Over the weekend, without telling us at all, the city noticed that the dumpster was the wrong type of dumpster for that kind of thing and had it sent to the dump. When we found out that they had took the dumpster, my parents had to rummage through the dump to find all of our precious belongings (photo albums, birth certificates, etc). They had already been mixed in with paint and drywall. We lost everything.

All of our memories, all of my baby pictures, the last pictures we had of our relatives that had passed away. Everything. Of course we decided to fire that contractor because of this and we eventually got another contractor that our insurance adjuster had shown us. Once he finally started working, we hoped for the best. Maybe this horrible nightmare would end and our lives would be back to normal. We were wrong. The contractor had messed our house up worse that the fire did. There was trash and cigarette butts in the heat vents, the drywall was hung before heating was done and he didn’t replaced the electrical in the basement of the house where the fire had started. We had decided that we needed to file a lawsuit against him. It has been 6 years since the house fire and we are still not in our home. With lawyer fees,rent that is double what our mortgage was, and having to pay for the mortgage on a house we can’t live in, we had to make a decision. We had to stop paying for the mortgage or risk becoming bankrupt. After a year of stopping the mortgage payments, the bank started trying to take our house away due to foreclosure. No one would help us. With enough evidence to end this case quick (we had thousands of pictures And lots of videos of the damage), everything that could go wrong did. With bad lawyers that would take our money and quit without a reason, and constant hoops to jump through, it almost was feeling like a conspiracy. How could this simple case turn into something so unbearable? We were losing everything because of a house fire that we didn’t even cause. A surge protector. The one thing that was supposed to “protect” us from this kind of thing failed. And we were losing; we ARE losing. The trial has been postponed 3 times for no reason whatsoever and we were forced to file bankruptcy. And it didn’t matter. We are going to lose everything. The house is going to get taken away in a couple weeks and we have no money to salvage our lives. The stress and loss of faith in God and humanity has made my whole family cynical, angry, and depressed. And we were never this way. Once a happy go lucky little boy, now with trust issues and nearly clinical depression because of what has happened to us over the last 6+ years. My life will never be the same but I am going to make it my mission to help others and help make our world a better place to prevent this kind of corruption and deceit from becoming the norm in our society. So now you understand what I go through everyday and now you can understand the reason I want to fix this society and this world. One blog at a time.