Woman returns from vacation to find her Atlanta home demolished by mistake

Atlanta – The owner of a home He is considering what his next step will be. after a company mistakenly demolished a home he owned in southwest Atlanta.

Susan Hodgson said in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press that when she returned from vacation last month, she found a pile of rubble at the site of her longtime family property.

“I’m furious”, Hodgson said. “I keep waking up and thinking, ‘Is this all a joke or something?’ “I am shocked.”

She said a neighbor called her when she was out of town and asked if she had hired someone to demolish the empty home.

“I said ‘no’ and she said, ‘Well, there’s someone here who just demolished the whole house and knocked everything down,’” Hodgson said.

When the neighbor confronted the workers, Hodgson said, they were rude.

“They told him to shut up and mind his own business,” Hodgson said.

He sent a relative to see what was happening and he asked to see a permit. When the person in charge of the demolition checked her permit, she admitted that she was at the wrong address, according to Hodgson.

“It has been boarded up for about 15 years, and we keep it boarded up, covered, with the grass cut and the yard clean,” he said. “We pay taxes and everything is up to date.”

Hodgson said he filed a report with the police and has spoken to lawyers, but they remain in limbo at the moment.

“We are still in the process of figuring out what to do,” he said. “We keep pushing in different directions to see if something happens.”

To date, she has not been contacted by the Atlanta-based company responsible for the demolition, You Call It We Haul It, she said.

“How can people just come and throw away someone’s property and then just walk away?” Hodgson questioned. “How can they think that’s okay? I wish you could fix the problem you caused.”

“It’s hard to believe that someone thinks they have the right to come, destroy something and walk away without coming back and saying, ‘I’m sorry. What do I have to do to fix it? It was an accident’. They did not give me anything”.

The company has not responded to a phone message left Saturday. In a statement to WAGA-TV, the company said it is investigating and working to resolve the issue.