Georgia father Eric Arnold sues county who demolished family home without court hearing: They took my dignity away

A devastated homeowner in Georgia is suing Macon-Bibb County officials after he claimed they demolished the home he was fixing up for his family without a court hearing.Eric Arnold bought the property in Macon, Ga.

– located 90 miles southeast of Atlanta – in February 2022 for just $15,000 for himself and his children, according to local news station WMAZ.“It’s like they just took it all away from me,” Eric Arnold the outlet.“They took my dignity away from me, like I wasn’t even a person.

Like ‘You don’t even exist, we just going to do what we want.This is our town.’”The home was supposed to be a “fixer-upper” that Arnold was renovating and eventually planned to live in, but the plans changed when a dumpster ended up on his property and his home was labeled an “imminent threat to the community.” The county had already listed the home for demolition when Arnold purchased the home.

However, Arnold’s lawyers allege that the father was not aware and that there were no liens on the home and no public record of Code Enforcement.It was eventually demolished in November 2023.The demolition was part of Mayor Lester Miller’s Blight Fight launched in 2021, which aimed to remove dangerous structures from neighborhoods but Arnold insists he paid his taxes and got the permits needed in order to save the home before it was torn down.“I did everything I was supposed to do.I thought I was okay.

I wasn’t okay.They still knocked my house down,” Arnold said.“While he still had work to do, the yard was neat, the exterior was clean, the house was locked up, and, most importantly, it was in a vastly improved state of repair compared to when he purchased it,” Arnold’s lawyer Christie Herbert wrote in a statement on her website.Herbert claims the county “secretly sped up the demolition” after Arnold asked them to stop and remove his home from the demolition list.

All that’s left on the property now is a concrete slab at the end of a d...