Posted on 08/26/2018 4:25:19 PM PDT by NohSpinZone
Johnny Bobbitt, famously rescued from the streets of Philadelphia last October after word of his kindness to a stranger went viral and led to a $400,000 GoFundMe campaign, is once again homeless, drug-addicted — and panhandling for money.
The couple who started the fund-raiser say that in helping Bobbitt, they've spent or given him more than half of the money donated by thousands of people around the world and they are withholding the roughly $200,000 balance. Bobbitt says he fears that the couple, Kate McClure and her boyfriend, Mark D'Amico, squandered much of the money. He worries there may be little, or nothing, left.
(Excerpt) Read more at 2.philly.com ...
They collected the money telling people it’s for the homeless vet. They raised the money under false pretenses, if they don’t give all of it to him.
If they gave that homeless drug addict a big pile of money and he goes off and ODs, people here would be crying, "Idiots! They knew he was a drug addict and yet they gave him all that money! They should go to prison for murder!"
We just had a GoFundMe fundraiser connected with our nonprofit. The law isn’t really established on these fundraisers; people all the time take the money and run. There is no recourse.
You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
Or, as Larry the Cable Guy would say, “no matter how hard you try, you can’t baptize a cat.”
Is GoFundMe even legal? What about all the myriad of state and federal regulations and taxes it has to go through?
Not that I believe her but the woman who started the campaign claims that GoFundMe took $30K for “processing fees” out of the $400K. If that’s the case, that would be outrageous in and of itself. GoFundMe should address that allegation directly.
GoFundMe charges 2.9 percent payment processing fee and $0.30 per donation. It’s a profit-making endeavor.
Wow The GoFundMe organization took a $30/k fee? Hefty chunk. Johnnie can’t handle $ or anything else for that matter being drug adled and the couple are a mixed bag— trying to help him and helping themselves to the cookie jar at the same time. Lawyers? Vultures take their cut too.
Advice to Johnnie— get clean and get a job and stop choosing to be a street bum. As for the donors they got hustled out of their well meaning donations.
“If they gave that homeless drug addict a big pile of money and he goes off and ODs, people here would be crying,”
Somehow that doesn’t make me feel better about them spending it on themselves.
Yo...Bill and Hillary...is that you?
My dad and mom our elderly and have tried to help out a bunch of homeless people over the years by giving them places to stay either on their property or in houses that they owned along with giving them money. It has never worked out not even once. The people they have tried to help keep wanting more and more. When people finally say enough is enough they turn on you and make all sorts of allegations. My parents have lost tens of thousands of dollars trying to evict people who never paid a dime of rent and completely trashed their properties.
People who can't make it in our society always blame others for their situation when the real problem is usually substance abuse and mental problems. I feel very bad for this young couple who had the very best intentions for this clown and are now having their good name smeared and their reputations drug through the mud. Speculation by people who have no clue about what is really going on makes me a little sick. Shame on them all for speculating about this good couple based on what a thieving druggie has accused them of. There is usually only one reason a homeless guy gives a woman $20 and it is not out of the goodness of his heart. And shame on the druggie for not being able to get his act together even after a couple expensive treatment programs and being given a real chance to straighten his life out...
Its always cute the way android autocorrects your grammar and changes “are” to “our” among other typos.
I don’t think the homeless guy is a saint by any stretch of the imagination but what makes you so certain about the virtues of this couple? The allegations against them sound pretty damn serious to me.
Because as I said in my post my parents have had all sorts of allegations made against them after they have tried to help multiple people. I even have a bit of experience from a similar situation myself. I once tried to help an elderly homeless vet who it turned out was suffering from dementia far more than we realized. He lived with us while I tried to get him placed in a veterans home that our friend a retired colonel was in charge of. I don't have enough time to go into the entire story, but the poor guy's out of state family who were the biggest bunch of deadbeats in history made all sorts of groundless allegations against my wife and I.
So you kind of have to use just a smattering of common sense when evaluating who is more believable. The good Samaritans are at least ten times if not a hundred times more credible than the drug addicted dead beat they tried to help. If you can't figure that one out... then there might be something wrong with your reasoning abilities.
I think you should look into this particular case a bit closer. I’m so sorry that happened to your parents - that’s just messed up. But you may have a blind spot to this couple’s shenanigans as a result.
You my not have much experience with dealing with or trying to help drug addicts. And of course the media never accuses good people of wrong doing based on what an unreliable source tells them. Frankly, you buying into this self-righteous hit piece makes me wonder about your “blind spot”.
Actually, I hope you’re right. Stories like me sap my faith in humanity. I would very much like this to be a big misunderstanding and overreach on the homeless guy and his advocates parts.
I want to set up a gofundme account for my ingrown toe nail.
How the heck does anyone go through $200k in 10 months? It would take work to breeze through a tenth of that in a year for us.
If he wanted to move out of NJ, why not hook the camper to the SUV? Makes no sense to sell it ... but we know it was to get money for drugs.
.
I’m not saying that is beyond possibility, but I doubt it.
Thank you for your last reply.
The young couple definitely started out with the best intentions and went far beyond what just about anyone else would do to help this guy out. They bought into this guys BS and went all out for him.
After sending the guy to expensive rehab twice, letting the guy move onto their family’s property, and then being robbed by him on multiple occasions... they probably thought that the best solution was to force the guy to get on the straight and narrow before letting him waste any more of the donated money on drugs and alcohol. I can almost guarantee that whatever they do, the guy will end up right back in the toilet as soon as the money runs out. But one would think that whatever money is left would be a strong incentive to try and at least pretend to be trying.
It is also no surprise that instead of being grateful for the assistance that he has received already, that this street wise con artist would start playing the victim as soon as he didn’t get his way... One thing about street people, they don’t like playing by the rules. They prefer to live on the street rather than stay in a shelter where they have rules.
Do you think that a lawyer specializing in guardianships would do a better job? I spent years volunteering in long term care facilities. This variety of lawyer is generally someone who couldn’t make it as an ambulance chaser...
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