Family house stripped by burglars
News 12 6 o'clock / July 12, 2012
Augusta, Ga.-- "They took the sink, the metal sink. Wow," said Vinson Verdree, as he looks over the stripped kitchen. He always knew it could happen, but now his worst fears have come true.
"I had a shower head in here that I replaced a couple years ago.They tore the piping out," he says as he points out the gaping hole in the bathroom wall. The shower is just one of the many items that were stripped from the house by burglars. "The televisions, air conditioners, even my dad's old power chair that he used to get around. They even took that," he explains.
Vinson lives in New York but he's keeping this Augusta property in honor of his grandmother. It's been in his family for over fifty years. He had strict orders from his grandmother about what to do with the house--"she said don't sell her house because she worked too hard for that being a single black woman in the sixties, first getting her own house and then trying to maintain it." He says now everything she worked for is desecrated. "Desperation knows no limits," he says sadly.
The room where the washer and dryer used to be is now just an empty space. "Well this was my room. . .I used to have a television and a VCR/DVD right there," he says as he walks through his old room. Even today he's still finding things missing. One of those missing items is a 1930's cast iron sewing machine that was his great grandmothers.
"Evidently they wanted some stuff they could pawn and resell," Vinson suspects. A family treasure, now trashed. "It just make you feel sad, especially since this is what my grandmother worked most of her life just to achieve," he says somberly.
Vinson said a cousin helped him keep up the property while he was gone, but it's hard to keep abandoned property safe, The Richmond County Sheriff's Office recommends calling into their records office to put any abandoned property you have on their house check, even if you're just going on vacation for a week or two.
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Copyright WRDW-TV News 12. All rights reserved. This material may not be republished without express written permission.
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