Local soldier returns to find home ransacked and stripped of fixtures, pipes
CLEVELAND -- Sergeant Gertie Lynn was counting the days until she could return to the home she'd purchased last year in Cleveland's Lee-Harvard neighborhood.Imagine her shock last week when she went home and found thieves had ransacked her possessions and stripped the house of piping, fixtures and building materials.
"I was very angry, very angry. What a wonderful Veterans Day," she said.
Lynn lost electronics, CD's, her daughter's athletic equipment, copper piping, a water heater, insulation and drywall.
She had dreamed of owning the house in the neighborhood she grew up in.
"It's so small and cute. I told my aunt I'd own that house one day," she said.
She has not totalled up the value of what was taken. And she fears her insurance may have lapsed because she hadn't received all her mail.
Her aunt, Margeree Pittman of Bedford Heights, was doing weekly security checks of the house. But she couldn't recently when she was hospitalized for a month.
"It's just horrible. It's just unforgivable that someone would do somebody like that," Pittman said.
Sgt. Lynn was serving with a medical unit in Germany, collecting blood needed for wounded fighting men and women in Iraq.
She will soon return to her job here as a nurses' aide in a psychiatric hospital.
She's presently staying with her aunt.
Councilwoman Nina Turner and the USO are exploring possible ways to help Sgt. Lynn through donations and help from businesses.
Sgt. Lynn says she's eager to return to duty, but only after she's settled in and made sure her home is protected.
There's video, too.
This sort of thing just makes me seethe. And it made the anchorwoman on our evening news so angry that she could barely speak after reading the story.
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