Memorabilia from Joe Del Rio's 30 years of service in the U.S. military is now hidden away in a shed behind the home he grew up in.
"It wasn't like 'Well, I'm going to plan to go somewhere, I'm not going to come back no more,'" said Del Rio. "It was nothing like that. I was taken out of my house, forcefully."
In May 2010 a line of concrete trucks lined the street outside the East Austin home. Under the direction of the Code Department, crews filled tunnels Del Rio had dug underneath the house around the bomb shelter that was constructed when the house was built.
"It started out that I had that bomb shelter and I noticed that all the cedar posts that hold the house up were starting to rot away. So I replaced them all myself," Del Rio said.
The plumber said he then decided to expand the underground area.
"I was going to go ahead and do a workshop all the way across, but I was going to save one area. I got some tools that are very old that don't exist no more except for museums and stuff and I was going to make me like a museum right here and display all my old tools and such."
But Del Rio didn't have permits and he says a code enforcement officer accused him of building bombs underground. When the 22 concrete trucks filled the tunnels underneath his home, the city cut off the electricity and took away the certificate of occupancy, kicking Del Rio out.
Six years later, the legal fight to clear his name is complete and Del Rio just wants to live in his house again, but he can't because of action the city took when they removed him.
"There is no electricity. They cut off all the wires. They disconnected many active wires. The plumbing, we don't know what type of damage was done when they poured the cement," said Gavino Fernandez, Jr., District 12 Deputy Director for the Elderly of LULAC.
LULAC is stepping in to help Del Rio. Fernandez said the elderly man has been denied city funding set aside to fix houses in this neighborhood and that his calls and emails to Mayor Steve Adler and Interim City Manager Elaine Hart, asking them to intervene, have gone unanswered.
Now, LULAC is hoping the community will pitch in to fix the house so Del Rio can go back home.