72-year-old Austin veteran is held at gunpoint, home seized because of underground bunker
If ever there were an example of government adding insult to injury, this is it. What else could you call it when a city government fills in your underground bunker with concrete then bills you $90,000 to do it?
Two years ago, Austin, Texas, resident Joe Del Rio awoke to find city officials demanding he let them in to inspect his home. Before it was all over, the local media reported, a police SWAT team and a host of firefighters had been called in as well.
Del Rio’s crime? City officials had a problem with what they described as a “multi-level bunker-type space” under his home that supposedly held suspicious materials.
Detained and questioned for the next 10 hours, authorities eventually let Del Rio, then 70, go free. But over the course of the next few years, his case took some bizarre twists. For one, the city wound up billing him $90,000 for sending a small army of cement trucks to his home to fill in the bunker, saying such action was necessary and prudent in order to make his home “safe.”
Harold
ACGR's "News with Attitude" 