One day, Sgt. Heather Kolke from the Walled Lake Police Department in Michigan was approached by a woman asking her legal advice.
The woman and her two children were homeless, and she simply asked the police sergeant if it was illegal to sleep in their car.
“She started asking me legal questions,” the police sergeant recalls.
“I asked her if it was illegal to sleep in a car and to see just in case if we did have to,” the woman said.
“So of course I started asking more questions of her and discovered she was going to be sleeping in the car tonight so she could get the kids to school in the morning. They were homeless,” the sergeant added.
The woman named Erin Harrison told her that herself and her two daughters Hayden and Abbigale were evicted because she couldn’t afford to pay the skyrocketing rent price.
However, they needed a place to sleep – and they’ve been surviving in their car on the parking lot of the children’s elementary school for a while now. They had nowhere else to go.
Erin works day in and day out at a local McDonalds to take care of her two beautiful daughters, but they weren’t able to move into a home yet.
When the police sergeant was confronted with this heartwrenching question, she immediately decided to help.
“As a mom, I knew I had to get her a place to stay,” Sgt. Kolke wrote.
Sgt. Kolke was a mother herself and couldn’t let this family go without a place to stay. She quickly reached out to some friends and colleagues to gather enough money for a hotel room, so they could at least have one warm and cozy night.
The police sergeant also gave a fun birthday party for the twins Hayden and Abbigale – they were celebrating their ninth birthday just a couple of days after.
“I was already talking to the girls, telling them I wasn’t going to be able to do anything for their birthday,” mom Erin recalls.
Luckily, the police department and local community were able to give the twins a party they never saw coming.
“Balloons donated by Party City, a cake from Buttercream Bakery. They said their favorite food was Pizza Hut. They donated pizza,” said Sgt. Kolke.
The news about this family in need quickly spread across town and even gathered the attention of the mayor.
Walled Lake Mayor Linda Ackley asked for help on the local news station to get this family a more long-term solution and a place they could call home.
Plenty of viewers were inspired by the police sergeant and decided to help this family.
Osram, the owner of a local gas station, even phoned other business owners to gather funds. Osram’s children even donated more than three hundred dollars of their own savings, because they’d rather let the children they saw on television have it.
The local community was definitely generous, and more than $2,500 in total was raised in a short time.
One person also volunteered to take Hayden and Abbigale on a $1,000 shopping trip for clothes and necessities.
Erin couldn’t thank the local community enough and promised that all of the money would be used to get them into a warm home.
“I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart,” she said. “It means the world to my girls to get somewhere.”
“I feel like I was connected with Sgt. Kolke through God. It is a reminder there are good people in the world,” Erin concluded.
A heartwarming act of kindness that led to even more generosity, what a beautiful story!
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