In everyone’s life, difficult times can come from nowhere.
An American can go forward, everything goes like clockwork, and then one blow of failure can change everything. Shannon Loveless and her family faced bad luck and found themselves out of the house and living in the woods from their van. The family, who was from Sacramento, California, had nothing left and had to struggle day after day to survive.
Because the Loveless family didn’t have a home of their own after hard times, Shannon and her children sometimes camped behind the local Walmart store. They hid in the woods behind the shop and camped out for the night. The family begged for food and searched for leftovers wherever they could, and took turns sleeping on the hard ground and in the family wagon.
“There was no light at the end of the tunnel”, Shannon told CBS Sacramento. Her life was an endless story of pain and suffering.
But everything changed for Shannon Loveless and her family when two aides, Officers Tim Yee and Johnny Le, stumbled upon the family while they were camping behind a Walmart. Shannon was afraid her life would get harder because she knew that police officers were often not very forgiving of the homeless, especially in California, where the homelessness crisis was out of control.
In the past, Loveless never met a police officer who was kind to her family. They were all rude and brief to her and urged her to do better than sleep in a van behind a Walmart in Sacramento with her three children.
However, Shannon didn’t have time to prepare dinner for her three children when deputies Tim Yee and Johnny Le arrived. They found the family struggling to survive, but instead of punishing Loveless for living in her van behind a Walmart store, they opened their hearts to the family and did something unexpected.
Deputies were horrified to see that Loveless and her children were living the way they lived. The children were starving and dirty and were apparently denied the basic necessities that other children take for granted.
Instead of punishing Loveless for being homeless, Deputies Yee and Le returned with a trash bag full of donated items. They brought food, toys and clothes to the Loveless family so they could have more than they had before. But that wasn’t all the police did to serve their community.
By the time the officers met with Loveless, she and her children had been living in her van behind a Walmart store for four months. The life of the Sacramento family was very hard, and they needed a helping hand. Fortunately, the police were ready to offer their help.
The officers helped the family move into a motel until they could move into more permanent housing. It was a huge step forward for the Loveless family and an act of generosity from the police that really made a difference.
