"I had just went and picked him up from school and I came home and the house was on fire," said David's mother Ellen.
The family lost everything - clothes, furniture, the keyboard and guitar that helped David focus, the fenced in yard that kept him safe from his autistic misunderstanding of boundaries. The family couldn't recover.
The family moved to a small apartment Ellen Mulvihill can barely afford as a single mom on her disability income. She considered welfare until Wheels for Charity offered to coordinate a volunteer effort to build and donate a home to her family. Individuals and contractors are donating money, time and talent.
"Put together a modular home for her. So instead of building from scratch, what we're going to do is take everything down here, put a new foundation up and drop a new home on top," explains Ed Stewart from Wheels for Charity.
The new digs may be the perfect prescription to help David settle back into a healthy routine. It's a reprieve from feeling like they couldn't get through tomorrow.
Once the foundation is demolished and a new one laid, the modular home will be brought over. And if all goes well, the Mulvihills will be able to move into their new donated home sometime this summer.
