12782 Celburne was the victim on St. Valentines Day 2008.
My friend Carol once dubbed this place the ‘Rat Trap.’ It had been abandoned in my whole working memory, and Carol couldn’t recall the last time she saw people call this place home. Evidentially, 12782 had been abandoned for many years, possibly since the Cordin/Allenhurst buyouts that started 10 years ago or more (that section was emptying out while I was in high school). The fact that the house was painted in the most neutral and boring shades of tan which matched the tan brick didn’t help the overall appearance and minimized any reverence for the place.
If any of the houses were tied up in some kind of never-ending court issue, this had to be one of them. Its been empty for so long, that the windows couldn’t be any more broken out and the place didn’t have a free spot from graffiti. It was one that got tagged with a swastika, but the garage door where the foul mark existed was broken and twisted beyond recognition in its final few months. In the garden that once existed just outside the living room window, a weed was allowed to go into a 5 foot tree. Driving past on the evening of Valentine’s Day, I was shocked to see the bulldozer in the middle of the yard with no other indication that a house was once there other than a thin strip of driveway left for the following day’s work.
J. Desy Schoenewies
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