Jun 8, 2009 8:48 pm US/Central
For Glendale Heights, Seven May Be A Crowd
GLENDALE HEIGHTS, Ill.
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Single moms Barbara Szewczyk and Judy DeBatty pose with their children in front of the Glendale Heights home they share.
CBS
You may know someone who is having financial hardship, maybe on the brink of being homeless. Imagine offering them a place to stay, then being told from the city, they may have to go.
It's happening to a Glendale Heights woman.
CBS 2's Mike Parker reports.
As one sympathetic neighbor put it tonight, this is a classic case of "No good deed goes unpunished."
In this case, it is a Glendale Heights Good Samaritan who feels she's being victimized by village bigwigs.
This is a family portrait: two single moms and their five kids. There's Barbara Szewczyk and her two teen-aged sons and her 15-year-old daughter. Three and a half months ago, after her husband died, they were in danger of becoming homeless.
Enter Judy DeBatty and her teen-aged son and daughter. They voted to let the family in trouble stay in their house for a while.
"So I said, 'I could be one paycheck away from living on the streets myself, and I just think that's a thing that friends need to do,'" DeBatty said.
But somebody told Glendale Heights village officials that the house is overcrowded with seven people living there and that DeBatty is running a rooming house.
"I don't know who the complaint came from, it was an anonymous complaint," community development director Marty Olsen said.
That's what really ticks off DeBatty.
"This is absolutely, unequivocally, the most evil thing that anyone could do," she said.
And as for the rooming house allegation, "I have absolutely said I do not want one penny of their money," DeBatty said. "I just want them to be OK."
DeBatty showed us a recent home appraisal, showing there's 2,900 feet of space in the house, four bedrooms and three baths. It seemed spacious enough.
"I think it would be unfair not to investigate," Olsen, the village official, said.
"What do they want? They want me to shove these people out on the street?" DeBatty countered.
The Polish-born Szewczyk wants only to talk about her friend's generosity.
"We're still in awe about this, okay?" she said. "We call her (angel)."
DeBatty is ready and willing to share that appraisal and those pictures with village officials. But she says they have no right to barge into her home and poke around without her consent.
The director of village development says he is sympathetic with both families, but that the law is the law.
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