INDIANAPOLIS — What started as a woman just providing a holiday meal to a homeless couple four months ago has grown into providing them a home and making them part of the family.
Instead of demanding the government or other organizations do something about homelessness in Indianapolis, an extended family decided they had to do what they could to end homelessness for one couple placed in their path.
Tina Perry and Charlie Burden have been together for 13 years. Like most people living on the streets, there’s a list of problems that gradually left them without a home.
They consider themselves lucky, the happy recipients of a “fluke,” as they call it, when complete strangers decided to help them above and beyond what they could ever imagine.
The couple moved into a completely furnished southside Indianapolis apartment home on March 26. The place already feels like home.
“Yes, it does,” said Burden, sitting on a couch next to Perry in the living room.
“It feels really good being here,” said Perry. “I go in the bathroom all the time and look at the standup shower.”
You don't take a bathroom, a bed, or anything else in your home for granted when you’re homeless and people suddenly come into your life and provide you a home.
"It was a warm feeling,” said Perry. “I felt it on my heart. I was so glad and happy. Three-and-a-half years was too much to be outside. But I didn't have a choice."
For a year-and-a-half, the couple lived at night in a climate-controlled self-storage locker they still rent for $70 a month. Everything they owned was stuffed in the storage unit, and they slept inside until management said no more.
That put them out on the street, often sleeping under a former bank drive-thru overhang. Charlie said it keep them dry, but not warm.
Christy O'Brian took them leftover food on Thanksgiving.
"This is so outside my box,” said O’Brian. “But there was just something there that just brought me to them. The first time I saw her she was a gentle soul. She wasn't going to hurt anybody. I think people are scared of homeless people. But they're just like us."
Christy and her extended family kept going back, bringing food and money. On a cold, snowy day in February, they decided they had to do more.
The family picked up the couple and put them up at a nearby hotel for five weeks, while trying to find more suitable housing through government assistance. But they found the system offered little or no help.
Rosezita Lankford, Christy’s mother, said she was often in tears when phone calls were not returned, or she ran into roadblocks and red tape.
"He said he couldn't do anything unless we put them back on the street, and I said no way are we going to do that, no way,” Lankford recalls from one conversation with an agency.
So with personal connections and community help, the family raised money, found an apartment house and completed major renovations in four days. They threw a welcome home party for Perry and Burden two weeks ago.
"This was something that we realized after getting into it that it was a lot bigger than us,” said Joe Zeigler, Christy’s brother-in-law. “And there was a lot bigger issue. And I think it's just because we care."
"What they did for us is just unbelievable,” said Burden.
“We've got words to say,” said Perry. “But it's hard for it to come out."
"In the beginning, sure, we just wanted to get them off the street,” said O’Brian. “Then okay, fine - we're kind of done. But then each time we just kept growing and growing and finding more ways to help them and if we can do that, why not do that?”
Strangers have become like family, who won't let their family be left without a home.