Woman says KCK apartment complex accidentally cleared out her townhome
KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- A Kansas City, Kansas mother came home this weekend to find her apartment empty.
She said apartment managers at Gateway Plaza Townhomes first told her to call police thinking there must have been a burglary. But now it seems to be the result of a clerical mistake.
FOX4 made several efforts to get an explanation from Gateway Plaza Townhomes as to how this happened.
What Myrohn Guthrie knows for sure is she and her two kids are left with nothing.
In the two years she spent in her unit, Myrohn Guthrie shared images of her happy home and two children, full of love and of course furniture.
A video of her shocking discovery has been shared more than 14,000 times since Monday.
"I just started crying immediately and my jaw dropped and I was like oh my God," Guthrie said.
Couches, dressers, TVs, beds, even the food in her refrigerator were all missing.
"I actually had just gone grocery shopping too it's completely empty," Guthrie said.
Guthrie said she spent several hours trying to convince management there was no way it was the work of a burglar with no forced entry. So she says they eventually checked their records.
"That's when they told me, 'we're so sorry we cleaned out the wrong unit,"' she said.
She estimates $32,000 worth of her belongings were trashed because someone missed their intended assignment to trash out a townhome in the complex by one number. But she's more disappointed to have lost items that were priceless to her family.
"It's stuff I literally can't get back. I had the canvas picture from here to here," Guthrie said, describing one of her missing family portraits.
She also said she's disappointed by management's response.
"They haven't asked 'do you or your kids have somewhere to stay, do you have food do you have clothes?"' she said.
After our multiple calls to apartment managers and their home office in Nebraska went unanswered for 24 hours, FOX4 visited the offices of the public housing complex.
A representative said Seldin Company sent a statement Wednesday saying they are investigating and working toward a resolution for Guthrie.
Meanwhile, Guthrie is staying with family right now and wearing a shirt with a smiley face to mask her tears. She said the hardest part will be what she hasn't had the heart to do yet: explaining it to her children.
"They keep asking me, they want to go home, they want to go play with their toys, they want to play with slime, they want to play with their iPads, but it's all gone," Guthrie said.
Unfortunately, Guthrie doesn't have renter's insurance. She has no plans to start life over in that empty apartment, but said starting over anywhere will be difficult because she also lost important paperwork like Social Security cards and birth certificates.