Summertime has been especially warm in Fort Worth, Texas with temperatures going up to 90 degrees, and that’s just in the mornings during the month of June. The heat was hard for anyone to bear, but for all those people who don’t have any air-conditioning, it can get lethal. People who are usually at most risk are children but especially seniors.
Such is the case of ninety-five-year-old World War II veteran Julius Hatley. Despite having served his country with great valor and being able to escape from the enemy, he has not been able to escape the burning heat. He does have an air-conditioner, but the problem is that it recently broke down. As a result, his home has been feeling like a burning oven.
He’s been trying to think of ways to cool down like spending time perched in the shade of his porch. He had figured that this would provide him with some relief and it did for a while. But it got to a point where he couldn’t take it anymore. Everything got to a point where the intense heat started to mess with his head. He felt disoriented and not knowing what else to do, the senior decided to call his local Forth Worth, Texas police department.
William Margolis was one of the officers on duty that day. He told CBS News, “This wasn’t a regular 911 call.” Getting this type of call does not get prioritized, it will usually go to the bottom of the list. Nevertheless, Margolis and his partner still decided to go that day seeing that he was a war veteran and all that.
“When we got there around 8:30 a.m.,” Margolis told CBS News, “his house was 85 to 90 degrees already. In Texas, it gets hot.” They asked the veteran for permission to check his house, their main concerns were both the air-conditioning and the window. Their doubts were confirmed that both were broken. Not only was his house getting hot during the day, but it was losing a great deal of the cool temperature it had acquired during the night because of the broken window.
The two officers knew then and there that they needed to do something about it, even though they didn’t know what it was. After a while, they realized they needed to go to their local Home Depot and get him a new air-conditioning unit. When they got there, the good people from Home Depot found out what the situation was and gave the officers a $150 credit on any unit they chose. These officers were on the road to changing the veteran’s day. What else would they do?