Posted on 01/15/2012 2:28:02 AM PST by afraidfortherepublic
Somewhere around West Bend, several people have pieces of U.S. Navy Commander Wilma Roberts' life - her furniture, her china, her clothes, financial records, the family Bible, even the ceremonial sword from her son's graduation from a military academy.
Nearly all Roberts' worldly possessions were auctioned off by a storage business last summer after a classic military snafu: Though Roberts, 48, was on active duty in Japan and Kuwait from July 2008 to July 2011, Navy officials stopped paying for her storage in 2010 and told the West Bend company it could sell off the goods - though the Navy bureaucrats and even the storage business could have easily learned that Roberts was deployed and protected from such an action.
A man who bought Roberts' more than 7,000 pounds of stored belongings for $2,101 in June later sold most of the things at a yard sale - just as Roberts was returning. She valued the goods at $60,000.
But it's the moving and storage company, Chips Express, that now finds itself a defendant in federal court.
Roberts sued the firm under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which prohibits the sale of any active military member's property to pay a storage lien without a court order. The lawsuit seeks actual and punitive damages and the costs of monitoring Roberts' credit record, because she fears possible identity theft from her missing personal financial records.
Her attorney, a retired Air Force colonel in Louisiana who specializes in cases under the act, concedes there were also serious mistakes made by the Navy.
"It's a real crying shame we did this to one of our own, but the ultimate responsible person is Chips Express," lawyer John Odom Jr. said.
The company's president, Hank Schloemer, said his family-run operation has been contracting with Naval Station Great Lakes' Personal Property Office to pack, move and store service members' property for 15 years and had never heard of the law or had a situation like Roberts'. Officials with the Personal Property Office told him to treat the goods like an unpaid civilian lot, he said, and never tried to help him get better contacts for Roberts over the months Chips Express tried on its own to track her down.
Schloemer also disputes another of Odom's claims - that the buyer at auction had doubts when he unpacked Roberts' crates, and went back to Chips Express to ask if there had been a mistake. Odom says the buyer - whom neither Odom nor Schloemer would name - got information from Chips Express from which he inferred Roberts had been killed in action, and went so far as to put up her photo with candles to that effect during the yard sale.
"That's a bunch of baloney," Schloemer said. "I think that was for effect more than anything."
Items packed up in 2008
Roberts, an Illinois resident and a critical care nurse, has been on active duty with the Navy since 1991. In 2008, she was in training in Milwaukee, Odom said, when she moved to Okinawa, Japan, for two years. That's when Great Lakes arranged to have Chips Express pack up, move and store her property until July 2010.
While stationed in Japan, Roberts was deployed to Kuwait, Odom said. She says she contacted Great Lakes' property office to let them know she would be gone another year, not returning until July 2011.
Somehow, that message never got recorded, and on Aug. 31, 2010, the Navy converted Roberts' storage contract to private-pay. In December, Chips Express sent overdue payment notices to an address for Roberts in Colorado, but they came back undeliverable. In April, it sent a notice of lien to the same address; it was also returned.
On July 2, according to the lawsuit, Roberts' possessions were sold at auction.
A week later, Roberts came back from overseas and requested her property be delivered to her new address in Illinois.
Schloemer remembers that phone call.
"Great Lakes called us with directions on where to send her things," he said. "We said we'd just sold it all. The comment by the person down there was, 'Oh my god - I'll call you back.' "
Roberts, who didn't respond to an interview request placed through her attorney, told the Navy Times last fall that when she found out, she immediately tried to get the name of the buyer, but Chips Express wouldn't cooperate until a Navy lawyer intervened.
Schloemer said the buyer had expressly asked that his name not be given out, and the business wasn't sure about privacy rights. "We got caught in the middle," he said. "Finally we released the name to the Navy."
Odom says that when Roberts went to the buyer's house in West Bend in August, he almost fainted. He had burned her photos, and the only thing he kept was her grandmother's fur coat, since his wife had fancied it, which he returned - though with the original owner's embroidered name panel cut out.
Roberts sat in her car and cried for 45 minutes, the buyer told Odom.
Schloemer said that within a few weeks of the problem's discovery, two people who worked at Great Lakes' Personal Property Office retired, and within a couple of months, the whole operation was closed and transferred to Norfolk, Va.
A public affairs officer with the Naval Supply Systems Command's Global Logistic Support, Nannette Davis, did not return a message Friday. In an interview with the Navy Times, she called the communication breakdown regrettable and said the Navy will do more training in storage procedure so it won't happen again.
HHG - Household Goods
GBL - Government Bill Of Lading
PPSO - Personal Property Shipping Office
NTS - Non Temp Storage (indefinite duration specified by PPSO)
HOR - Home Of Record
SIT - Storage in Transit (2 to 90 day duration)
SDDC - Surface Deployment & Distribution Command
DPS - Defense Personal Property System
Sheese.
What he has contributed is fact regarding the military personal property procedures. I store the personal prperty of thousands of service members and can attest to such. The service member wouldn't be authorizing the sale, the Joint Personal Property Shipping Office would - at the end of the non-temp storage entitlement listed on the applicable 1299 form, the JPPSO would contact the service member to determine their status and then issue a storage extension or convert it to member's expense. The JPPSO issues the orders to the storage providers - they said to sell it, end of story. Moving companies cnnot arbitrariy decide to continue holding personal property for an indefinite duration - it costs resources and makes no sense - if JPPSO says to store it, it is stored, if not, why hold it?
And you base your opinion on what, exactly?
“get it in as small a space as possible”, regardless of damage done. Gratefully we were young and had nothing of true value.
Ping!
Your part of the world.
I disagree.
I can find fault with the individual soldier for not taking the steps to ensure the security of their belongings.
I can find fault with the military for not ensuring the security of the soldier’s belongings, if the soldier wasn’t in position to do it himself. The military can always dock the pay of the soldier in question to get the money back.
But I can’t really find fault with the storage company for treating a storage container in default as a storage container in default. When somebody, for whatever reason, stops paying rent, what other option does the storage company have?
>> what other option does the storage company have
Go fight for the Country.
And go out of business while doing so?
I don’t know if you own your own business or not, but would you really risk your business and your employees’ well-being because somebody didn’t have their act together?
This has naturally been a recurring source of tension since he has lived most of his adult life in rural Florida.
Yeah, all that, let’s just vote the bastards out of office....
AGAIN
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.