Lore Creque held back tears as she recalled the Sunday before Thanksgiving - the day she says her family hired Alternative Property Maintenance to chop down a tree in her father's backyard in Ohio that was damaged by a storm.
"My husband and father were on the deck, I was in the house with my mom and they were prepping to cut the tree," recalled Creque.
Creque says as soon as they started chopping, the tree slammed into her parents' back porch, trapping her dad underneath its limbs.
"I ran out from the front of the house to the side and I couldn't see anything," she said. "Then I ran back in the house and my dad had run from here off the deck and was on his knees and my husband was next to him trying to determine what was wrong with him."
Creque's 82-year-old dad now has a broken leg, two broken hips, a broken shoulder and a spinal fracture. And who's paying for his hospital bills? According to Creque, it's not Alternative Property Maintenance.
"They have made no contact with us, we have reached out to the numbers that we have from their company many times," said Creque
Cleveland-based WEWS reached out to the company, too, and didn't get many answers. The guy who picked up the phone, Corey Howard, said he was not the owner of the company, even though the police report says he is.
He said the four-person crew was probably cutting down a different tree and the tree in question just fell on its own. The police report says otherwise.
In that report filed on Sunday, November 19th, the officer says he heard the workers arguing saying:
"If you would have gone up 20 more feet, this wouldn't have happened."
WEWS also learned that none of the workers had valid drivers licenses and the plates on the work car were expired. Police have also made multiple attempts to contact the company with no luck.
