lucy wightman

OK so I have less than $400 to my name and $50 of it is going to this family.  It is Christmas.  Anyone else in??  Leave a comment and let us know… 

Timely gift halts eviction of gravely ill girl’s family

The Hull Times

By Susan Ovans — 12/10/2009

A family facing the imminent loss of a child to an inoperable brain tumor was able to stave off eviction from a Hull Housing Authority apartment this week thanks to a timely check from Wellspring.

Four-year-old Natalie Coble was diagnosed with a fast-growing malignant brain tumor in June. The tiny child with a moptop of blond curls has ballooned to more than 100 lbs. due to edema, fluid accumulation in her brain and body tissue, and is now confined to her bed, where she is receiving hospice services.

Natalie and her three siblings, ranging in age from 2-1/2 to 10, moved with their parents to the housing authority’s Nantascot Family Apartments at Central Ave. and C-D streets last November.

Brad Turner had to give up his job this summer to help his wife, Brandy, shuttle Natalie to and from radiation and chemotherapy treatments at Children’s Hospital in Boston and to care for the other kids – Franklin, Machaylah, and Steven – at home.

Brandy Turner said this week that doctors have told the family that Natalie’s tumor is growing at a rapid rate and she may die before Christmas. Her birthday is New Year’s Eve.

Although well aware that they are several months late on their $408 subsidized rent payment, Brandy Turner said she was stunned on Tuesday to receive a 14-day eviction notice from the housing authority. The notice to pay up or leave the apartment was dated Dec. 2, but the family didn’t receive it until Tuesday, the 8th, because the housing authority sent it to the wrong address.

“So, essentially we have a week,” Turner said Wednesday, after a family friend who had also lost a daughter to cancer called the Times with the story.

Turner learned that rent assistance might be available through Wellspring’s Diane Edson Fund, which is dedicated to helping individuals and families in “immediate crisis situations due to unexpected circumstances or some form of tragedy,” according to the agency’s website.

Wellspring Executive Director Vinny Harte confirmed this week that the local social-services agency paid half the owed rent – $820 – while the family was able to pay the other half. Brandy Turner said she and her husband took the sum from money friends and families raised at a benefit in late November for Natalie’s anticipated funeral expenses.

HHA Executive Director Catherine Luna said late Wednesday that all the rent had been paid and the Turners are now current. She said that the family was one of eight rent-delinquent housing authority tenants who had received eviction notices last week.

HHA administers 28 units of family housing at C and D streets and the 40-unit housing for seniors complex on Atlantic House Court on behalf of the state Department of Housing and Community Development. The local agency has been under a state mandate to reduce rent delinquencies since DHCD censured the housing authority for financial and administrative deficiencies under previous director Paul Daley.

The five-member elected HHA board fired Daley in 2006 and hired Luna’s consulting firm, Execu-Tech, which also administers Cohasset’s housing authority. Since then, the agency has earned state praise for significant administrative improvements in a short time period.

While she was aware of the difficulties of the Turners’ situation, Luna said that legally the agency was obliged to send them the same eviction notice that other tenants in arrears had received. “It would have left us open to discrimination charges” to begin eviction proceedings on other tenants while sparing the Turners, she said.

Responding to Brandy Turner’s allegation that the housing authority knows that the oven is not working and had been unresponsive to that and other problems in the apartment, Luna said a new stove has been ordered for the family and will be hooked up next week. She said the agency didn’t know about the problem until a plumber was sent out last week to deal with a complaint about a noxious smell coming from the heating system, and Turner alerted him to the broken oven.

Turner, however, said that she “filed all the paperwork” to make the housing authority aware of changes in the family’s financial situation, which under state guidelines could trigger a rent modification, and also called several times about deficiencies at the apartment that were made more urgent because of Natalie’s declining health and issues with balance and mobility.

“More than one time she fell all the way down stairs,” Turner said. “They didn’t even put up a gate. They would do nothing for us.”

Luna and a clerical aide work part-time. The housing authority’s full-time maintenance worker, Peter Nixon, is out on medical leave due to an injury. And Luna said that there simply isn’t enough money to fix a host of problems at both HHA complexes.

Natalie Coble Fund, Sovereign Bank, 523 Nantasket Ave., Hull, MA 02045