My Life Story

Hello, my name is Richard Colbert and this is a brief overview of the life I have lived and hardships I have endured. This is very difficult for me to write/share so this only covers a few of the many hardships I have endured!

Dennis, I want to move to California he heard from his young wife. I am not happy here in Georgia, too many bad memories. Let's go! Without a hesitation, Dennis loaded up their Conversion Van and away they went, heading west in the spring of 1971. They had no money so they would stop along the way and Dennis would find work as a Mechanic to earn enough money to drive a few hundred more miles. Every time they would run out of money they would stop and find a little work.

All was going well, until Phoenix, AZ where Debbie got sick. After a quick visit to a local hospital, they discovered that Debbie was pregnant. They called her adoptive parents back in Georgia to inform them of the news and then turned around and headed back to Georgia. About a month later arriving back in Georgia and getting an apartment. Dennis returned to work at a Union 76 gas station as a Mechanic.

Seven months later their one and only child (together) was due to arrive. Debbie went into labor on January 22^nd, 1972 in the late afternoon and was transported to Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, GA. Over two days later in the early morning hours of January 25^th, 1972 I was born. Two weeks late and with a firm grip on my mother’s insides when I came out!

You see, I wasn’t a normal birth. In fact according to everyone in the know at the time I should never have survived. My mother, a hippie chick, was doing every drug known to mankind before and during her pregnancy. When I was born I was addicted to so many different drugs that I spent the first 6 months of my life (outside the womb) in the hospital, most of it hooked to untold amounts of machines to feed me and keep me alive.

I wished I could say that would be the end of my suffering in life but sadly it was just the beginning of the story. The story of survival against insane odds. Once I left the hospital things went pretty good until shortly after my 2^nd birthday. Around this time my Dad had given up both drugs and alcohol but my mother refused to do so; resulting in constant and never-ending fighting between them.

Just after my 2^nd birthday, I was admitted back into the hospital where I would spend another 6 months hooked to numerous machines with some “mystery illness”. At least that is what I have been told. In truth, I believe my mother poisoned me and the reason for that belief will become painfully obvious before this story ends.

On my 4^rd birthday, my parents got into a massive fight and my dad took off down the road on foot. My mother ordered me to go bring him home or she would kill me. So with no shoes or jacket (it was chilly in North Florida that time of year) I took off down the road after him. I chased him all the way to where he worked as a mechanic at the time but he wouldn’t come home, instead, he had the local police take me home. He left with the clothes on his back and the few things he had at work as well as a car he had been repairing for himself at work that my mother didn’t know about.

I cried all the way home begging the police not to take me back to my mother. Telling them she would kill me. But they dropped me off at the house and left me there. That night the beatings and horrific abuse at her hands started. On a pretty much weekly basis for the next year and a half, I would suffer some horrible and unthinkable act at her hands. From beatings with studded leather belts leaving bruises and open wounds over my entire body to starvation, suffocation, and attempted drownings.

Then at 5 and a half years old my dad reappeared with his new wife Linda and paid to move my mother and me to Dauphin Island, Alabama. He was the main mechanic and ran the Marina on the island and my step-mother ran the C-Store at the Marina. Across the street from the Marina was a trailer park where my dad and step-mom lived and they had bought a second mobile home in the park for my mother and I to live in.

For a little while I was happier than I had ever been. I instantly grew close to my step-mom which infuriated my mother; when she wasn’t in Mobile sleeping with anyone who would buy her drugs or alcohol. Then one day I walked into my mom and I’s mobile home and caught my dad in the bed with her. I instantly ran to my step-mom and told her that even at 5 years old I knew that wasn’t right and loved my step-mom more than either of my parents. Needless to say that afternoon my mom was on a bus back to Atlanta.

I thought, or at least hoped, that would be the last time I ever saw her. I was happy in Dauphin Island, loved my step-mom and never wanted to leave that Island! Sadly, a few months later after a lot of begging to see me my dad and step-mom agreed to take me to Atlanta for a visit with my mom. On the 3^rd day of the visit when my dad and step-mom came to get me, my mother asked me who I loved more her or Linda and I couldn’t help but tell the truth. Hearing that I loved Linda more drove her insane and she refused to let me go back with my dad, keeping me with her and my Godfather in Atlanta.

My godfather, Jessie Lee, was an amazing man even if he was a weekend alcoholic! Sadly he was unable to protect me from my mother and her bi-polar multiple personalities. After this, my mother would disappear for months at a time (usually 9 months to a year). However, when she was around the abuse was often severe! Daily and often multiple times a day!

My godfather was, I long  believed, the only person in my life that never hurt me or abused me. Sadly, I have now realized that wasn't the case. For most of my life I remember being sexually molested and raped at the age of 6 or 7 years old but the person who did it was always fuzzy and I couldn't see who it was. Recently I started a new medication and after the first dose the memory of that event came into clarity with such vividness that it almost cost me to take my own life. You see, it was my godfather who forced me to perform oral sex on him and then when he couldn't get off he held me down on my stomach, head buried in the pillows, and raped me until he came. To the best of my knowledge this only ever happened once and he never hurt me again.

By the time I reached 8 years old, the abuse had become so commonplace that I didn’t even fear it anymore. I just took it and went on! Then my mother decides to take me to Florida for the summer. We were staying with her boyfriend at this beautiful house near the ocean (not sure where). The boyfriend was a hard-core alcoholic but never mistreated me or my mother. Then one day he decided to take us out on his boat in the ocean and my mother’s girlfriend (yeah that kind of girlfriend) and son come with us.

After a full day out on the ocean we get back to the boat ramp and the beach was covered in those small crabs so the boyfriend jumps off the nose of the boat onto the ramp and goes to get the truck/trailer and backs it into the water. My mother then drives the boat onto the trailer and the boyfriend takes off. Never stopping to let us out of the boat or even tie the boat down to the trailer. When he goes to turn into the driveway at home the boat flips off the trailer and I land on my back in the middle of the road as the walk-through windshield explodes and slices my left leg over halfway through. Thankfully my mother managed to also land on her back and catch the edge of the boat with her feet, lifting it up enough I could crawl out.

They (the 3 adults) were all so drunk and laughing that they thought it was “just a scratch” so at 8 years old I had to make a tourniquet around my leg, put my now passed-out mother in the front passenger seat of her car and drive myself 20+ miles to the nearest hospital. Yeah, I know but alcoholic mother so wasn’t the first time I had driven with her passed out in the vehicle!

I checked myself in and after several hundred stitches and staples, my leg had been reattached. As I was walking out of the hospital the police were there handcuffing my mother and taking her to jail. After the police left (without even talking to me) I got in the car and drove myself home and told the boyfriend and girlfriend what had happened as they were finally starting to sober up.

The boyfriend went and bonded her out of jail the next day then pretty much ended his relationship with my mother. Allowing us to stay there but not really having anything to do with her. So she decided a few weeks later she needed to get laid and took me to a bar with her, leaving me in the car while she went inside trying to find someone to fuck her. After several hours of trying she came back to the car in a rage and began beating me in the car saying it was my fault, she couldn’t get any. When we got back to the house I crawled into my bed which was in the same room as hers and attempted to go to sleep. After a few minutes of listening to her rant, she pulls her loaded 357 out of the dresser and orders me to come “service her” or she would blow my brains out. Now obviously at 8 years old, there isn’t a whole lot my body was capable of doing to “service her” and she quickly realized that and grabbed me by the hair on my head shoved my face between her legs, and almost suffocated me before she finally gave up and shoved me down between the wall and her bed and passed out!

Once I was certain she was asleep I crawled under her bed and quietly got back in my own bed. A few weeks later we went back to my godfather's house in Atlanta and she disappeared for months. Each time she would disappear I would pray she would never return, but eventually she would show up again claiming she was sorry and “better now” and all would be good for a week or two then the abuse would start again.

At Eleven years old she had just returned from being gone for over a year and came to my godfather’s house insanely drunk and after he tried to talk her down got me in the truck with her. She then backhanded me with her car keys in her hand resulting in my forehead being split open almost from one temple to the other. She then pushed my head down between my legs sat a drink on my back and said if she came back and that drink had spilled she would kill me. Then she went into the house with my godfather. After a couple minutes and my shoes completely full of my own blood I jumped out and ran down the street before a lady who was doing yard work grabbed me and took me in her house. She wrapped gauze around my head to stop the bleeding enough I could see what was going on and called the police.

I was taken by ambulance with a police officer in the ambulance with me to Grady where I was born and my head was stitched up. While at the hospital a judge came and spoke with me and gave my grandparents temporary custody of me. A few weeks later my mother found out where I was and came to my grandparents house and threatened to kill them if I didn’t tell the judge I fell and did that to myself and lied about everything. Fearing for my grandparent's lives two weeks later when I had my first custody hearing I told the judge I fell and made up the story about my mom, and so he relinquished me back into her custody. Before we even got out of the courthouse parking lot she beat me so badly I couldn’t move for nearly 3 months.

Shortly after she got me back she moved me to a farm in Villa Rica, GA, and married my Step-Dad Troy. He was also a mechanic and reminded me a lot of my dad, alcohol use and all. They fought like cats and dogs and he would routinely “have enough” and disappear. Every time he would disappear she would turn her rage and abuse back at me. A few months after we moved there she again beat me to within an inch of my life and called my grandparents; selling my near lifeless body to them. I spent 3 months on their couch unable to move. When I finally could be “seen in public” they enrolled me in a Private Christian School as my mother refused to sign over custody. I got into sports playing Baseball, Football, and Basketball for a year or so before she came and got me. She was now living on another farm owned by Bobby Austin who was the biggest alcoholic I have ever met. He was one of the nicest people I ever met as well.

We lived in a mobile home on his farm that had chickens, pigs and cattle. It was a nice place and I got to do a lot of things. We had horses as well and one week while preparing for a horse race I would compete in (my second) my mother had me out in the yard running figure 8’s with my horse when she snapped and beat me with a horse whip while forcing me to run for hours. This was a few days before my 13^th birthday which happened to be the weekend of the horse race. The horse race that actually was hosted at the farm we had lived on previously in Villa Rica, GA. I won the horse race even though I was bloody from my shoulders to my toes with open wounds from the horsewhip.

The Monday following the horse race I went back to school in Dallas, GA, and immediately asked to see the school counselor. Showing her and her classroom of kids what my mother had done to me by stripping to my underwear in front of the entire class. I demanded she get me in front of a judge before school let out which she did. I stripped, again, in the courtroom and asked to “sign myself into state custody” which I was allowed to do for 30 days while they investigated the abuse. Two days later they made it official and stripped my mother of all parental rights.

For the next two years I would be passed around like party favors from one foster family to another and from one group home to another. While most of the foster homes were amazing, the second they even hinted they wanted to adopt me I would be moved within hours. The group homes I was in were nowhere near as nice and I was routinely beaten, abused, or molested by staff members resulting in me continuously running away. The last group home I was in was Murphy Harps Vashti United Methodist Children’s Home in Cedartown, GA. While I was there I was beaten, molested, and locked in a padded room so many times that I ran away 28 times. Twenty Seven of those I went straight to the local police station and reported the abuse; every time they didn’t believe me and took me back to the group home. The twenty-eighth time I ran away I went to my grandparents some 100 miles away.

While at Murphy Harps Vashti I was leaving Typing Class one day and as I walked out the door a kid hit me in the back of the head with a 5lb weight and crushed the first vertebrae in my neck. I wouldn’t find out the extent of the damage until 1998 when I began having constant migraines which have not stopped to this day.

After a week or so at my grandparents, my Case Worker (Linda Crew) called them and asked them to bring me to a meeting at her office on Wednesday to discuss where they were going to put me. As soon as the meeting started Linda Crew stood up and said there were a couple people here to take me to my next home and she opened the door to reveal two Georgia State Patrol officers. I knew instantly she didn’t believe me either and was having me committed. Sure enough, an hour later I was admitted to Northwest Georgia Regional Medical Center (A psychiatric hospital that looked like a group home) in Rome, GA. She promised me it was only temporary until she could find somewhere more permanent to place me.

A few days after arriving at the mental hospital my Librarian at the high school I attended found me and came to visit. She would come every weekend for the next three months to see me and always bring me gifts and rolls of quarters so I could use the payphone in the building where I was housed.

Notice up to this point there has been no mention of my father since I was 5 years old. That’s because for 10 years I had no contact with him except an occasional package that would arrive at my Godfather’s house or an occasional phone call to my grandparents but he and they always deny it was him and wouldn’t let me talk to him as they all feared my mother.

After about a month in the mental hospital, I managed to track my father down with nothing but a payphone and rolls of quarters. He was living in a small town in Texas called Venus. I managed to get a hold of the police station there and get them to go give him a message to call me on the payphone at a certain time and we began talking. He immediately reached out to Georgia to get custody of me but they refused, forcing him and my stepmom to become Foster Parents in the State of Texas before Georgia would consider sending me to live with my dad. After 3 months in the mental hospital, Linda Crew, finally came and got me, took me to Atlanta, and put me on a Greyhound bus to Texas.

Think things are gonna get better now, well you would be wrong. After 10 years my dad had changed, I had changed and the anger and resentment/regret we both had was too much for us to overcome. We fought constantly, often physically fighting. We loved each other but did not like each other AT ALL. The love that I had for my stepmom had also waned after 10 years and she had gotten her own two daughters back so her love for me had also faded.

After a few months, I ran away from my dad and went back to Georgia, to my mother as I had nowhere else to go and had never “been on my own”. I was immediately emancipated by the State of Georgia when Texas reported I had run away. My mother was now living on a 35-acre horse farm in Temple, GA in a tiny travel trailer. After a few weeks there I wound up fleeing for my life with nothing but the clothes on my back, no shoes, no identification, and no money. Her place was about 10 miles north of Temple and 25 miles west of Dallas, GA where my first foster family lived. I walked all the way to Gene and Diane Neathawk’s home just west of Dallas and asked for help. They took me shopping buying me some shoes, a few changes of clothes, and a backpack but ultimately gave me a few bucks and sent me on my way.

For the next few years, I hitchhiked around the country where I would be beaten, drugged, and molested on more than a few occasions. At 18 I was working in the restaurant of a Casino in Henderson, NV as a busboy. It was a Friday night and every server except one called out or didn’t show up and of the four bussers I was the only one to show up. Needless to say, we were slammed and I had my bus pan way way overloaded, as I leaned over and picked it up with my body twisted to the left I heard someone call my name to the right. Just as I got the full weight of the bus pan I turned my head right, heard a couple snaps, and down I went.

A couple co co-workers carried me the 4 or 5 blocks to the Workman’s Comp clinic. After a few scans, the doctor informed me I had exploded L4 and L5 vertebrae and would never walk again due to the damage to my spinal cord. An hour later I got up, walked out of the hospital, and went to the house next door which is where a couple of my coworkers lived, and laid down on the couch. I didn’t move, without a lot of help, from the couch for 3 months. Eventually, I was able to get up and learn to walk again.

Months later, while living in a shelter in Denver, CO I called my mom only to find out that my grandmother had passed. No one would help me get back to Georgia for her funeral and it took me nearly 2 months to make it back to Georgia after getting abused and molested a few more times on the way there. When I finally got back to Georgia and showed up at my grandfather’s house I found his Church Pianist living with him. Turns out him and her had been having an affair for years. You see my grandfather was a Racist, Homophobic Southern Baptist Minister who never slept in the same bed as my grandmother but was screwing his pianist….in his church! After a few months of being homeless in Atlanta, I finally talked my grandfather into taking me to see my grandmother’s grave. That would be the last time he ever had anything to do with me and told me so on the drive home from the cemetery. He dropped me off in Atlanta and we never spoke again!

At this point, I was desperate and depressed so I signed up for the US Navy. This was during Dessert Storm and it was extremely hard to get in without college. Since I didn’t finish high school but did have my GED I kept trying, living with my mom in Temple, GA I spent every waking hour training by running and doing push-ups and sit-ups numerous times a day. After two failed attempts to join the Navy, I finally got in and reported to MEPS in Atlanta on January 5^th, 1992, and was flown to Boot Camp at NAS Orlando on January 6^th, 1992. I graduated boot camp in March of 1992 and in May was stationed at NAB Little Creek in Virginia Beach, VA.

Since I had no formal training, they had me working with GSM’s (Gas System Mechanics) and GSE’s (Gas System Electrical). Having only been stationed there a few weeks I was the Grunt who did the work no one else wanted to do. One day while inside of the Prop Exhaust of a Gas Turbine Engine, the captain of that particular LCAC fired up the engine, ignoring the safety flags I had up. This resulted in both my ear drums busting instantly even though I was wearing ear plugs and headphone ear protection. I crawled out of the exhaust port with blood streaming down my neck from both ears. I wound up getting a nasty ear infection that moved to my optic nerves and for several weeks I was nearly completely blind and deaf. Eventually, my vision returned and most of my hearing but I had permanent hearing loss and tinnitus in both ears. The constant ringing in both ears 24/7 almost drove me insane and took me nearly a decade to “get used to” but even now it occasionally gets so intense I just want to fall asleep and never wake up.

Shortly after I got my sight and hearing back they had me start working with the only Electronics Technician at my command. Since the vast majority of the equipment he maintained on the LCACs was Secret or Top Secret I wasn’t able to do anything but watch him and fetch him stuff like a dog. I shadowed him for two weeks then they sent him to Dessert Storm to work on the LCACs there in Kuwait area that had stormed the beaches.

A few weeks later my CO called me to his office because 15 of the 17 LCAC’s we had were inoperable for one reason or another. With no schooling, formal training, or security clearance my CO asked me to fix his boats and within 24 hours got me a promotion, security clearance, and a letter from the Secretary of the Navy authorizing me to work on them with no training. At that point 15 of the 17 boats were inoperable for various reasons and in one day I fixed them all and had them flying again. A task that should have taken 2 weeks to a month.

In late July or Early August of 1992 while working on some equipment in a tiny cubby hole under the flight deck the ship-to-shore generator that was powering the craft malfunctioned. The ground strap broke and fell against the hot wire of the generator and sent 44,000 volts at 4,000 amps through the hull of the craft. I was electrocuted and blown off the floor into the deck above me 3 times, each time being electrocuted again when I hit the metal deck above me and got blown back down to the deck below me. For the math impaired that is 6 electrocutions in a matter of about 3 seconds. Finally, the generator blew up. I immediately crawled out, off the ship, and went to get the van to drive myself to the hospital on base. However, the instant I touched the van I discharged so much electricity I fried the darn thing. So I went in my command trailer, grabbed the keys to the backup van, and drove myself to the base hospital.

Once at the hospital, I told them what had happened, but they didn’t believe me. But doing their job they attempted to give me an EKG and I fried the machine, then a second and third one before they finally believed me and hooked a ground strap to me and plugged me into the wall to discharge me while they hooked a 4^th EKG machine to me. They said my heart was fine, gave me a couple days of bed rest, and sent me on my way.

The Navy, initially, tried to say I hooked the generator up wrong and blew a $150,000 generator up. Once my bed rest was over I went back to my command, got my CO and took him, and showed him the generator and together we found the ground strap had rusted into and fell onto the hot wire. I was cleared of any wrongdoing and sent back to work as an ET.

Shortly after this, I lost my memory. Around October of 1992, something happened, what I don’t exactly know. I had a fiance I met right out of boot camp who was stationed at NAS North Island in San Diego, CA. We both had been denied leave numerous times as they wouldn’t let us leave for more than overnight due to Dessert Storm and we were both technically on Sea Duty! I say something but I don’t know what because I have no memory from October 1992 until December 1993. I do know I got kicked out of the Navy (Other Than Honorable) but do not know why.

I know I was flown home to Atlanta and I immediately hitchhiked to San Diego to see my fiance. I do know I arrived in San Diego in December of 1993 and her service records prove that as she was on Base Restriction when I arrived so all my visits to her in December 1993 are part of her Military Record. I also know that my duffle bag, military records and everything I owned got stolen on my trip from Atlanta to San Diego.

For over twenty years I requested my Military Records once or twice a year, only to be told every time that I never served in any branch of the US Armed Forces. Finally, I got a Texas State Senator to request my records and received some records. The records I eventually received were a few pages from MEPS, a few shot records from Boot Camp, one hearing test in September 92, and a Discharge Physical in October of 1993.

The discharge physical had handwritten notes on it by the doctor about the hearing loss, electrocution 3 months prior and a note stating “Right Shoulder and Neck Injury” which I have absolutely no knowledge or memory of. There were zero service records given to me, no record of my court-martial, what I did, why I was forced out, or anything.

The weird part of this is that I was discharged as an E2 and anyone who gets kicked out of the military is stripped of rank first so I should have been an E1 at discharge. It also shows, after numerous handwritten date changes, that I was discharged in December of 1992; not in December of 1993 when I believe I was actually discharged. Furthermore, the use of OTH discharges is rare as that basically means “The Navy doesn’t want you….right now….but reserves the right to call you back to service at any time they choose”. I also had a Re-Enlistment code that would have allowed me, had I known, to go back into the Military.

So in December 1993, I hitch hiked from Atlanta, GA to San Diego, CA. Arriving there just before Christmas 1993. In early January 1994, my fiance was hospitalized at the Naval Hospital at which time we broke up so I moved to Hollywood, CA, and lived on the streets for a few months. For a while, I bounced from Hollywood to Las Vegas and eventually made my way to Key West, Florida. The thing is I was in Atlanta, GA trying to hitchhike back to California when I got a ride from a trucker. I fell asleep in his truck around the Georgia/Alabama line and woke up 3 days later in a different semi truck alone in a parking lot in Key West, FL. This was sometime in 1994. I lived on the streets in Key West with no ID or anything else except the clothes I was wearing for a few months then in September 1994 I hitchhiked to Fort Lauderdale, FL, and began working as an Exotic Dancer at a couple Gay Bars.

After a few years of Dancing and other not-so-legal things, I started my own Computer Business teaching people how to use their computers which led to repairing/upgrading computers and eventually to building computers, installing/repairing networks, and so on. I eventually moved into Bulk Emailing and became one of the most prolific Spammers on the Planet before getting out of that business in 2000 just before laws started being passed to make such activities illegal. At this point, I started buying/selling/trading stocks and futures and was really really really good at it. Did I mention I was really good at it? In fact, I was so good within a few months several INITIALED GOVERNMENT AGENCIES started showing an interest in me, so I quit. Moved back to Texas and lived with my Dad and Stepmom and tried to start my computer repair business back up there but this was around the time all the tech stocks took a massive dump and computer parts got so cheap no one was repairing them anymore. When they broke they threw them away and bought a new computer!

So after a few years of struggling to make money, I went to truck driving school in 2003 and began a new career as a Professional Truck Driver in October 2003. Things went mostly okay for the next few years then in 2009 I got a friend suggestion for my ex-fiancee’s dad on Facebook so I sent her a message. This was the first time we had talked in 16 years. During which time I had met, married, and divorced a guy in Florida and she had met, married, and divorced 4 guys; having a daughter with the 3^rd guy. Within 2 weeks of reconnecting with her, she had moved to Texas to live with me. On 10/10/2010 we got married after 19 years from when we initially got engaged. Sadly things were not all rosy and peachy and in December 2013 we got divorced. At this point, she was living in Nashville, TN with her new boyfriend (now husband number 6) and I was living in Atlanta, GA, and minority owner in a trucking company that I both ran and drove for. For the next year and a half, I worked 100+ hours a week trying to build up and keep running the trucking company before finally shutting it down in 2015. I moved to Southern Alabama and worked for 2 different trucking companies then in 2016 moved back to Texas and worked for a trucking company. Then left Texas in 2016 heading to Utah but broke down in Idaho Springs, CO where I lived for about a month until I could patch my mother’s old conversion van together enough to make it to Utah. Yeah, she was dead at this point passing away on July 4^th, 2016 of Stage 4 Brain Cancer.

I finally made it back to Utah (where my ex-wife and I lived for a bit after we got married) and went to work for a trucking company there, for the 2^nd time. Eventually, switching to work for a trucking company out of Illinois for the second time as well. While working for the Illinois Trucking Company I got a load to Denver, CO, and was going through Kansas City where I believed my half-sister (whom I had never met was currently living).

So I called her and found out she had moved to Denver and she and two of her sons were living in their pickup truck. A few days later I arrived in Denver, CO, and met her for the first time in May of 2019. In November 2019 I quit driving a semi, bought a cargo trailer, and loaded up my stuff which I had moved to a storage facility in Illinois and moved to Denver, CO to take care of my sister and her two boys. My sister had Amyloidosis Cancer that she had been fighting for years but was really sick, couldn’t work and she and the boys were about to be homeless, again.

I moved to Denver, in with them, and then sold almost everything I owned to get their bills caught up before going to work for both Uber/Lyft to support us all. Then the Pandemic Hit in early 2020 and at the same time she got diagnosed with Stage 4 Breast Cancer. Due to her cancer(s) and the Pandemic, the entire household was put under Medical Quarantine. For over a year, none of us could work and if it wasn’t for Pandemic Assistance we would have been homeless. Finally, after a year I start back to work doing Uber/Lyft and work 3 days before my vehicle gets repossessed.

Eventually, in October 2021 I get a job as a Property Manager for Public Storage and got back to work. I worked for Public Storage until April 2023 when the pain from a lifetime of abuse, injury, and a destroyed back caught up to me. I was forced to quit my job and move into my 1994 Chevy Suburban where I lived and slept in the Driver’s Seat for 6 months before finally getting a small PopUp Truck Bed Camper and eventually a 17’ travel trailer to live in.

After over a year of being homeless, I finally got an apartment on 5/30/24 thanks to Veterans Affairs (the VA), Denver Housing Authority, Volunteers of America, and Rocky Mountain Human Services. By some miracle, my 1994 Chevy Suburban held together long enough for me to get into an apartment. It is all but dead now and while will technically still drive it only has 3^rd gear, no power steering, no AC, heater blows hot all the time, and multiple other issues so I only drive it very rarely and only short distances.

I also acquired a Pit/Mastiff Mix Service Dog named Baron the day I got the apartment and a month or so later I was gifted a sweet Ferret named Shadow!