I have a family in need of desperate help in Tennessee
If you don’t want to know the story, you can just skip through it. I need information about anywhere or anyone near Memphis, Tennessee who can help out a family that is in desperate need. Their house is unsafe to live in and they have no way to get out without help. Message me on Tumblr or email me at [email protected] if you have any information that can help.
I don’t have all of the details from their side, because they don’t have internet, but I have been through this entire process with them and can give you a cliff notes version.
My best friend lives in Tennessee; my friend and her family have lived in the same house since she was born (which is going on 30 years). Her family has always been on the extremely poor side of the spectrum, but they live happily and they manage the best way they can.
At the start of last year, they were starting to do very well. Keeping savings high and making money through jobs. They were even planning on selling their house and then moving. However, that is when the trouble started.
A man (who owns most of the land for miles around their property) started coming up to them and causing lots of problems. Saying that this is the only spot of land that he didn’t own and that his grandparents should have never sold it (yes, you heard that right). This house has been in my friend’s family for at least 50 years and no one has ever contested any of it. This was just the start of some of things he would start doing (and we later found out that he had done this to lots of other people in order to get a monopoly of the land in the area).
He would go on their property and tell them that according to this and this and what the old documents said, this was his, part of the building was his, the land well was his. He started putting up stakes in their yard and moving theirs. From that point, things just began escalating. He would start fights with my friend’s mother, who tried to handle everything as calmly as possible. They recorded most of the times he came up into their yard without his permission as well.
Their family started getting really scared; they would hear him walk around in the forest at night, drive by the house honking really loud, just making lots of disturbances that were meant to unrest them. This was just when things first started off, so it went for about 3-4 months I think.
Then it started getting even worse. My friend’s family loves animals. They basically raise a farm (no one kills anything for food as a disclaimer) and they use that to try and raise money (selling eggs or extra puppies, etc.) When this man started coming along, more “strange” incidents started occurring. Animals went missing, were poisoned, someone even opened their chicken coup, which caused a coyote to have a big feast. About this time, my friend’s mother tried to talk to him as calmly as possible, but he started freaking out. They were arguing about one of the stakes he was messing with. He slapped her hand so hard, everyone heard the cracking. She has lupus and is already in very bad shape so it broke her hand.
They’ve lost a lot more than just those things, too. They’ve been terrorized by this man for a year now. They finally went through the court process and settled out, because no one wanted to go through the time and money to try and fight it in court (which we all understood). The settlement did not go through as anyone wanted. My friends family lost most of their land and to make matters worse, their house is falling to pieces, quite literally. A year before this entire this started, he was logging in his property behind them, without a permit, which caused the rainwater to flood into their foundation. Now, the walls in their house are cracking, the floorboards are popping up, and nothing is safe.
I told them about gofundme as an option, but with no access to the internet, they will have to send me all of the files in the mail to upload myself. I am perfectly willing to do this, but that won’t be an immediate cure for the situation.
If you know anyone or anywhere in Tennessee near Memphis that could help them with their situation, please, please, PLEASE message me on here or even email me. I’m desperate and feel so useless not being able to do anything. I just want to help them find some sort of solution and if anyone has ideas, anything is more than welcome.
