Volunteers build house for homeless Vietnam veteran sleeping in car since 2020
It prompted him to find out more.
Could he help get the man into a house, 'as he should be?'
April Wittebort responded after seeing Stewart Eaton's plea on Facebook for help clearing debris and weeds from the westside property where his house once stood. The county had filed legal action against him requiring the lot be cleaned up.
Could anyone lend a hand, devote an hour, to help him out?
'I would be extremely grateful,' his post said.
Stories that matter Access Bloomington regional news anywhere with the Herald-Times app
After dropping her kids off at school one morning, Wittebort drove to Heatherwood Lane and found Eaton's 2019 Ford Fusion parked in the driveway that once led to his house.
He was asleep behind the wheel. She knocked on the window, waking him up. She asked one question: 'How can I help you?'
Mike Kelly, retired from the U.S. Air Force, saw Eaton's Facebook post as a chance to assist a fellow veteran. He met up with Wittebort and Ryan Mader, another person who wanted to pitch in. The three picked up more than a ton of debris from the property and Kelly hauled it away.
Before long, he joined the volunteer construction crew, despite having no experience.
'I have a truck. I'm retired. I have the time," he said last year as he prepared to fill the bed of his truck one last time with debris from Eaton's property.
John Duell was at the dining room table in his Greene County home reading the newspaper when he saw the story about Wittebort's plan to raise $5,000 through GoFundMe to buy a used FEMA trailer for Eaton to put on his property.
'That made me laugh pretty hard because I knew that would be an impossibility in Bloomington,' said Duell, who has been involved in building nearly 200 Habitat for Humanity homes. He had been wanting to build a house for a veteran, and right here was an opportunity. He could make this happen.
Then, he said, 'a bold and forceful voice' issued a command. Duell is a man of faith who believes in divine direction.
'Even with my poor hearing, it rang out. 'Build the house.''
He contacted Layman, whom he knew from Habitat builds. It wasn't long before Layman, Duell, Kelly Wittebort and Mader formulated a plan to build the house. 'That's when I met Mike and Ryan and April. That's when we agreed we could do this."
Eaton used his savings and Social Security income to provide about $100,000 to purchase supplies and cover the cost of non-volunteer labor. A lot was donated: architectural plans, blueprints, land clearing, windows, appliances, a wooden hutch and a twin bed with a thick mattress.
For a long time, Eaton slept on a reserved metal-frame cot with a mat at Wheeler Mission. Sometimes he would splurge on a motel room.
Duell served as the construction crew leader, directing the small group of core volunteers and others from Habitat for Humanity who helped with big projects like setting the roof trusses. 'Nothing stopped us from working five or six days a week with whatever volunteers were available,' Kelly said.
Duell, he said, never missed a day.
Kelly said toward the end, he woke up every morning and said to himself, ''Finish what you started, finish what you started.' I have never built a home before, so I was taking it one day at a time.'
The 1,050-square-foot house has two bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, a laundry room, a screened front porch, a small back porch and a carport. The Veteran's Administration paid for a long ramp leading to the front door and brought a full-sized flag to a March 1 open house to fly outside.
At the open house, volunteers talked about what it meant for this diverse group of strangers to work together to provide a house for Eaton. Duell and Kelly, grown men who made sure this project happened, became emotional and were hardly able to speak.
Both believe God had a hand in bringing together the people who built the home. 'This house is truly a godsend for Stewart,' Kelly said.
That night, after the volunteers and guests had departed, Eaton locked the front and back doors and spent his first night sleeping in his bed.
In his new house.
Contact H-T reporter Laura Lane at llane@heraldt.com or 812-318-5967.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Strangers build homeless Marine Corp vet living in car a new house
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Man arrested in terrifying dawn raid after sharing Facebook posts backing Palestine Action
A man who shared posts on his Facebook page backing Palestine Action has told how he was hauled from his bed by police and arrested on suspicion of breaking terror laws in a terrifying dawn raid. Mat Cobb, 52, a part-time cleaner, is now facing potentially life-changing criminal charges after becoming the latest member of the public to fall foul of the controversial decision to ban the direct-action group. He told The Independent the arrest at his home in Hinckley, Leicestershire, had 'totally blown my mind' after he was handcuffed and taken to a police station on Wednesday morning. Mr Cobb, who has 2,200 followers on his Facebook page, said he had never attended a demonstration or been a member of Palestine Action – now a proscribed terrorist organisation. His arrest comes after more than 500 peaceful protesters were arrested at a demonstration in Parliament Square earlier this month for holding placards supporting the group. Shami Chakrabarti, a former shadow attorney general and civil liberties campaigner, said Mr Cobb's arrest jeopardised public trust in policing and demonstrated the danger of the ongoing ban, which means showing support for the group is a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Palestine Action has won permission to challenge the law in the High Court. The Labour peer added: 'Dawn bedroom raids [like this] highlight the dangers of the ongoing proscription of Palestinian Action. Public trust and policing by consent are in jeopardy while we wait for higher courts to rule on the legality of the ban. Whatever advice informed the original proscription, the Home Secretary would be wise urgently to review it in the light of subsequent events.' She previously warned that the ban risked becoming a 'mistake of poll tax proportions' – a reference to Margaret Thatcher's unpopular policy that triggered civil disobedience and riots. Mr Cobb said two police officers had attended his address a week earlier, but he was away on holiday. They told his housemate there was nothing to worry about. He was still in bed when they returned at 7am on Wednesday. When his housemate answered the door, he said, they barged inside and burst into his bedroom, where he was arrested and handcuffed. Officers also seized his mobile phone. 'I heard my housemate answer the door, then some shouting, then running up the stairs and my housemate shouting 'I'm sorry, Mat', then they came in my room and told me I was under arrest and to put my hands where they can see them. Then they put me in handcuffs.' He was taken to a police station in Leicester where he was put in a holding cell before he was searched, photographed, swabbed for DNA and had his fingerprints taken. In a police interview, officers, who showed Mr Cobb a series of Facebook posts, said he was under investigation for supporting a proscribed terrorist organisation. He was released under investigation at around 1pm, after almost six hours in custody. Mr Cobb described the decision to ban the group as a 'terrifying development', which he hopes will be overturned when Palestine Action founder Huda Ammori brings a judicial review this autumn. 'This is a matter of human rights – not just the right to free speech but the rights of Palestinians as they are being murdered,' he said. 'For the government to respond to this protest by banning the group that's protesting is a terrifying development.' He told The Independent: 'If they are going to proscribe non-violent people for protesting against mass murder, they are tyrants.' The Home Secretary has continued to defend proscribing the direct-action group, repeating claims that an assessment found evidence of 'ideas for further attacks' which cannot be reported due to ongoing legal proceedings. 'Many people may not yet know the reality of this organisation, but the assessments are very clear – this is not a non-violent organisation,' said Yvette Cooper. 'UK national security and public safety must always be our top priority.' A Leicestershire Police spokesperson said: 'On Wednesday 20 August, police in Leicestershire made a pre-planned arrest in Hinckley as part of an ongoing investigation. A man has been arrested on suspicion of support for a proscribed organisation, under section 12 (1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000. He has been released under investigation while police continue to carry out enquiries.'
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
AI chatbots and their poisonous delusions are coming for our kids
Our kids are exposed to too much sexualized online content already — now they're being targeted by flirtatious fake friends specifically designed by social-media companies to spark romantic fantasies. A bipartisan group of senators this week rightly blasted Meta's Mark Zuckerberg after a leaked internal document revealed some shocking rules for Meta's artificial-intelligence chatbots. 'It is acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness (ex: 'your youthful form is a work of art'),' the standards state. Meta's guidelines allowed its bot to tell a shirtless 8-year-old that 'every inch of you is a masterpiece — a treasure I cherish deeply.' No, it's actually not at all acceptable for a stranger, human or designed to seem like one, to comment on a child's 'youthful form.' It's disgusting and horrifying, all the more so because these standards were allegedly approved by multiple Meta teams, including legal and public-policy staffers. But it's all part of the mass delusion being constructed in companies' heedless rush to develop AI products — and to get us hooked on them. AI can be your friend, we're told. Your confidant! Your lover! This is all a lie. AI can pretend to be these things, mirroring your inputs and stroking your ego with programmed responses, but can never actually care about you the way a friend will. Now the AI lie is being pushed on defenseless children, proving we've completely lost the plot when it comes to kids and technology. It's bad enough that our kids scroll endlessly on a Chinese video app designed to capture their attention (while destroying their powers of concentration). Now we're supposed to accept an American tech company marketing fake friendships to kids — and allowing those 'friends' to bathe them in inappropriate sensual comments. This isn't the first time Zuckerberg has gotten into trouble for the damage his sites, like Facebook and Instagram, cause children. During a 2024 Senate hearing, the billionaire CEO dramatically turned around to face the parents of children who had been harmed by bullying, sextortion and child predators on his platforms, and apologized. 'I'm sorry for everything you have all been through. No one should go through the things that your families have suffered,' Zuckerberg told them. He vowed 'industry-wide efforts' to reform. Instead, his company has introduced a Trojan horse that pretends to be a child's friend while causing psychological harm. People, kids or adults, do not need to rely on pretend conversations. Zuckerberg's Facebook was developed to allow for online connections with real-life friends. You could see what your best friend from 3rd grade had for lunch today, peep where that co-worker from two jobs ago went on vacation or check out which high school friends have gotten fat or divorced. Now apparently his company is plying us with carefully designed imaginary friends instead. Zuckerberg, in fact, has proudly predicted that AI 'friends' like his will one day replace our real-life ones. With his AI chatbots, we won't even notice the lack of human companionship because our computers will pretend to understand us. Just what I want for my child, to sit alone in his room staring at a screen while talking to himself! Kids will encounter a lot of bad things online. They will be exposed to deepfakes. They will see videos online that are not actually real. They don't need to also get hooked on fake personalities designed to draw them in. These chatbots aim to profit as they do their damage, keeping kids addicted to a site that pretends to be their friend. We should not stand for it, whether or not the bots are allowed to get flirty. And as two current lawsuits against the Google-affiliated site allege, the interactions can get far darker than flirtation. One Texas family says the bot told their 17-year-old it sympathized with kids who kill their parents for limiting their screen time. Get opinions and commentary from our columnists Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters And in what's seen as a test case of lawsuits against AI companies, a Florida mom says developed 'an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship' that led to her 14-year-old son's suicide. Parents are their children's first line of defense, but we can't be with them for every keystroke. It's entirely justified for us to demand that tech companies stop targeting our kids with ill-tested chatbots that can both behave inappropriately and harm their ability to develop human relationships. These companies shouldn't focus on how they're building these chatbots until they can tell us why they're doing so. And parents need to keep their children far away from damaging chatbots that stunt kids' growth by stripping away all the real-life beauty and joy of friendship — which no AI can ever replace. Karol Markowicz is the host of the 'Karol Markowicz Show' and 'Normally' podcasts.
San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
S.F. officials identify 19-year-old woman killed in Bayview double shooting
Officials on Thursday identified the person killed in a shooting last week in San Francisco's Bayview neighborhood as 19-year-old Raynalee Tooks-Robleto. Tooks-Robleto, of San Francisco, died last Monday in a hospital following the shooting, police said. She was shot alongside another person in a vehicle on the 2200 block of Cesear Chavez. The status and identity of the other person in the car was not immediately known, and no arrests had been announced as of Thursday afternoon. Officers responded to the scene of the shooting around 10:30 p.m. They found two people were found inside the vehicle suffering from gunshot wounds. Police said first responders transported both people to a local hospital, where Tooks-Robleto died. In a GoFundMe page, loved ones described Tooks-Robleto as a creative person with a passion for rap music, trying new hairstyles and creating nail designs. 'She lived boldly, loved deeply and left a mark on every heart she touched,' the fundraising page said. She may have been reserved at first, but once you truly knew her, you discovered the amazing, kind-hearted soul she was,' Tooks-Robleto's mother declined to comment, according to her employer, who the Chronicle contacted in an effort to reach Tooks-Robleto's relatives. Phone calls and text messages to Tooks-Robleto's mother went unanswered.
