United States Navy Veteran Rodney Morgan came to Reno about a week ago to get faster care at the VA hospital for his knee. While finding a place to stay and checking in with the hospital, Morgan stored his two bags at the Community Assistance Center ran by Volunteers of America. He went to pick them up Monday morning, and they were gone.
"I come to get my stuff with all the credentials you gave me and mine," Morgan says "And presto! Nothing."
He says they first walked through two green containers, and he knew which one he put his bag in, so he started to be concerned when it wasn't there. There were bags scattered on the lawn so he looked there, too. But after searching both places a couple times, he knew something was wrong.
"That's when I broke down," Morgan says. "I broke down and just started crying."
"All my documents, all my medals, my mother, my father, all my pictures of deceased family members," Morgan says. "I used to look at my father in his WWII uniform. And my mother... I used to look at that stuff when I'd get a little down it brings me up, it kept me up you know. My brother's letter that he had given me before he died, all that stuff you know, it kept me on my p's and q's. I could remember what they were saying, remember what they look like."
Other valued items lost include all of the medals he received from the Department of Defense and for serving in Vietnam.
Morgan spoke a length about some of the hundreds of pictures he had kept all these years, including some pictures his father took of construction workers building Sears Tower in Chicago.
"When he get on his lunch break he would go down there and take pictures," Morgan says. "And he would show his friends, and we knew not to mess with those pictures. You know then after he died and of course we got the pictures. I got all the pictures; that's all I wanted was the pictures."
Along with personal valuables, the two bags had his service records, which means his social security is somewhere out there, and that scares him. All of his medical records from when he was discharged were also in there, so there are other concerns, too.
"Those are hard to get," Morgan says. "If something happens I have to put in a claim, then I have to start fighting all over again to get an increase. I can't prove anything."
Unfortunately for Morgan, the bags had the copies and the originals of both his service and medical record.
"I should of left some stuff at my daughters house but I didn't because I'm thinking I've been carrying this stuff for years," Morgan says. "I didn't want to leave it there because they've been having fires and she had to abandon her house."
We reached out to the VOA but we did not hear back from them. Morgan says a manager with VOA called him Tuesday morning and they have plans to sit down for coffee soon. He says he knows they do good work, but sometimes the actions of a small number of people unfortunately spread to the group.
"I'm not even mad at the guy that did it," Morgan says. "I don't want him fired. I just want him to think more think before you do something because you can cause somebody their life without thinking."
"This is real out here," Morgan says. "You can't keep losing out here or you'll end up in some bad situations. So now I'm in one of those situations where I didn't put myself in a losing situation somebody else did."
Morgan says he wants to stay in Reno for a while. He actually got married in Sparks, and last visited Reno in 1975 to box at the University of Nevada, Reno. He recently signed a 90 day lease for a place in Reno thanks to help from the Veteran's Resource Center.
