Illinois village building home for veteran
HILLSIDE (AP) – An attached garage.
It’s the feature Sergio Lopez wants most in the donated home being built for him in Hillside, so he can help his wife bring in groceries or carry one of his sleeping daughters in from the car in the winter.
“It would make a big difference, because walking in the snow is a little bit complicatedfor me,” said Lopez, 27, of Joliet. “People who have full use of their legs, you do a lot of balancing with your toes, your heel, your ankle – and I don’t have any of that.”
Three years ago, a roadside bomb exploded under the Humvee Lopez was driving through southern Baghdad. His legs were destroyed and he now has two prostheses.
He was the kind of disabled veteran Hillside Mayor Joseph Tamburino had in mind when he set out to build a home on property donated by developer Plote Cos. As a Vietnam veteran, Tamburino said he feels a responsibility “to make sure that young people understand that freedom is not free. There’s a price for it.”
“When you start seeing these young people now ... and the injuries that they’re coming home with, it drives you with a sense of doing more to help.”
Hillside officials and Plote created a nonprofit organization that will provide the Lopez family not only with an attached garage, but a specially adapted house for free.
“Our goal is to turn the home over to the veteran and [it] be completely paid for,” said John Flood, assistant village manager. “The veteran will have to pay his property taxes and all of his utilities; it’s just that he’d own a home without owing a mortgage.”
Plote donated a 6,500-square-foot lot to the village as “a way of giving back to the community in which we developed,” said Adam Neisendorf, the company’s development coordinator. The lot, on the southwest corner of Harrison Street and Oak Avenue, was left after the reconfiguration of plans for Hillside Town Center, a retail center that opened in March.
No tax dollars will be used to construct the home, and the village will rely on donations of money, building materials and labor to its nonprofit group, Hillside Disabled Veterans Home Project, Flood said.
Lopez said he can’t believe his family – including wife Maria, 25, and daughters, Sofia, 3, and Sasha, 6 – is to be presented keys to a new home, probably on Memorial Day.
“I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve something like that,” said Lopez, who still wears a buzz cut. “The service is 100 percent voluntary. Nobody made me go there. I didn’t, you know, go above or beyond or anything. I just did what they told me to do.”
Lopez talks matter-of-factly about Jan. 4, 2006 – the day he was injured.
It was the middle of the night. Some soldiers in his company had apprehended insurgents and needed a translator to assist with their interrogation. Lopez was driving the translator.
“We were just traveling down the road and all of a sudden there was an explosion,” he said. The explosion “pretty much went right up the foot pedals ... so it went right up my legs and it threw me out of the truck.”
The force of the blast and his ejection from the vehicle caused “dozens” of leg fractures, Lopez said. His feet were “unrecognizable.”
“There were parts of my feet that were turned into dust, almost,” Lopez said. “It was like if you took a bunch of Cheerios and just crunched them and put them in a Ziploc bag. It was really that bad.”
After the blast, Lopez faded in and out of consciousness. He knows most of the facts from that night only because they were written in a report. When he was awake again, he said, his first thought was to see if his “guys were OK.”
Neither the three other soldiers nor the translator was injured.
“At least it was just me,” he said, his voice trailing off.
Lopez was selected to receive the home after the village requested a list of disabled veterans who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan from the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs. There were none who lived in Hillside, so the search was broadened. “Others were asked and chose not to move to Hillside because ittook them away from their families and support network,” Flood said.
But for Lopez, the move will put his family closer to his in-laws in Downers Grove and to the Hines VA Hospital, where he periodically gets new parts for his prosthetic limbs.
The family already owns a home in Joliet, which Lopez describes as a 1971 “fixer-upper.” He was told he could keep it and rent it out until the housing market picks up.
“We didn’t want to make a requirement to say it has to be a disabled veteran that has no home,” Flood said. “We didn’t want to make it difficult for him.”
It’s expected that the new house will be titled in Lopez’s name with a covenant that it must be occupied for two years, Flood said. If he does not occupy it for the allotted time, ownership would revert to the nonprofit organization. Another veteran would be found.
Although Lopez describes himself as “pretty mobile” and said he uses his wheelchair on occasion, the house will be built to design standards required by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for specially adapted housing.
The standards call for handrails in showers and particular door widths for easier wheelchair use, among other things.
“He may not need it now, but he may need it down the road,” Flood said. “Needs change.”
Maria Lopez has seen firsthand how her husband’s needs have changed – from his 11-month rehabilitation stint at Walter Reed Army Medical Center to his hand-cycling in the Chicago Marathon this year.
What kept them going through it all?
“The main thing would be the love that we have,” she said.
