Security Company Helps Family After Disturbing Messages Left on Van
SANDY, UTAH – July 23, 2015 (Gephardt Daily) – An Ogden security company is helping a Sandy woman and her family after someone walked onto their property and left derogatory messages on their van.
Eliese Livingston’s five-year-old son Kyler has been medically diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, mixed expressive/receptive language disorder, an unspecified sleeping disorder and disruptive behavior disorder.
In support of Kyler, Eliese’s mom has an awareness sticker on her van that says “Autistic child may not respond to verbal commands.” Last Tuesday, while Eliese’s mom had been visiting with her and Kyler, someone entered her driveway and placed handwritten stickers around the sign that read “undisciplined,” “unetitled” [sic] and “spoiled brat.”
“My first reaction was anger,” said Eliese. “Then I started to think about the other autistic children that come to my home who are older and can read. What would they think if they had read those messages?”
Her next reaction was concern for her family’s safety. “It felt like an intrusion on my privacy, the car is parked right up next to my front door. The thought of having those people come to my home and I didn’t even know it is kind of disturbing,” said Eliese. “We are talking about getting motion detected lights outside our house and maybe a camera.”
Total Protection of Ogden reached out to Eliese and offered to install security cameras at no cost to her family. “We spend a lot of time advocating for different groups who work with both adults and children with special needs,” said Steve, co-owner of Total Protection. “Her story just really struck a nerve with both myself and my partner Brett.”
The company will be installing the state of the art camera system on Thursday. Eliese and her family will then be able to see their outside surroundings from inside their home as well as on their mobile devices when they are not at home.
“What so many people do not realize is when something like this happens there is an emotional scar that is hard to get past,” said Steve. “For someone to mock them or make fun of their child, or any child with special needs, is absolutely unacceptable and we hope by helping them out, they will be able to sleep a little better at night.”
Eliese has been surprised about the amount of support her story has received. “I could not believe how many friend requests I have received from strangers, the amount of times my story has been shared and all the comments. For the first couple of days I received over 200 comments a day.” said Eliese.
She is very grateful for the help Total Protection is giving her as they are still having some issues with neighbors. “We think some of the neighbor kids have been messing with our backyard, but we have a fence being put in to enclose the backyard and then the cameras being installed will help a lot,” said Eliese. “Other than the ones who seem to be messing with the backyard, we have had a good response to what has happened with our neighborhood.”
Eliese said she has been able to connect with neighbors, some who have come by to introduce themselves on their own, and she has also found out there are other children with special needs within her community. Eliese’s decision to share her story was to bring awareness about how children with special needs may act and to help the public to become more understanding. Bringing her neighborhood together might not have been expected but it was definitely a welcome surprise.
