A Small Town Rallies Around One of Their Own

From the outbox of Meyer’s video inbox:

Full disclosure: Even though I live in a big city, I’m a sucker for small town stories. There is just something about the tenacity and good will of small towns that holds a lot of appeal. This story is a classic example. When a mother of three was tragically paralyzed in a random act of violence, her neighbors banded together to upgrade her house for her return home. Here’s two salient points to keep in mind: 1) it’s not costing her a dime and 2) she didn’t even have to ask. Wouldn’t we all like to live in a place like this!

NEIGHBORS COME TOGETHER IN MORGAN HILL, TEXAS by Margaret Aro and Hanna Siegal reporting for ABC World News.

Brandi Todd was watching her children play in a park near her home in Morgan Mill, Texas, when a random act of violence changed her life. Unimaginably, while she was sitting on a park bench on a Sunday afternoon last month, a mentally unstable man who lived nearby, a stranger, walked up behind her and stabbed her.

The wound severed her spinal cord, paralyzing her from the waist down. Most of us, in the wake of something so random and so awful would break. But the first thing Todd did was forgive her attacker.

“You have to be responsible for what you do but he needed help and nobody helped him for whatever reason,” she says. She has a lot of support. An entire town’s worth to be exact. And they don’t believe in just sending sympathy.

“This community is like no other that I’ve ever known,” said one woman. “When there is a cause to support, we rally around and we get it done.”

Todd has no health insurance, but several doctors are donating their services for free. And while Todd, 28, has been recovering in a hospital, her neighbors have been hard at work, rebuilding her entire home so that it is wheelchair accessible.
“It’s just more important than anything else we’ve got going on,” said contractor James Starnes.

Like many members of this small town, Starnes has known Todd her entire life. “She’s going home in a week-and-a-half,” said Roger Behymer, the project organizer. “She’s got to have a place to live, so we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do.”

Check out the rest of the story and the video here.