For about two years now, starting at about six or seven o’clock in the morning, people yelled profanities and blew their horns when they drove by Bobby Brinkley’s home.
Some stopped or slowed down to take pictures of the property, which lay just outside the official town limits of Rural Hall, on Broad Street. They would post them to Nextdoor, a chat-based app for neighborhoods, and then bring complaints to town employees or Forsyth County officials.
A house, which looked like it had been hit and mangled by a hurricane, stood on the land next to another shelter, built around a camper where Brinkley, 67, and his wife Lindsay Childress lived.
“Have you seen that dump close to the bowling alley?” Childress remembered one Nextdoor message saying. “Man, it looks like a dump.”
The house had already been condemned in March 2023 by the county, who had ordered the property’s numerous heirs to tear it down. Since then, Brinkley, the only heir who lived on the land, progressively ripped the house apart himself while a real-estate developer acquired a majority interest in the land. A letter eventually told him about the developer’s decision to sell the property in a public auction, which will take place sometime in the future.
As months passed, neighbors, Rural Hall residents, and passersby watched Brinkley turn the already debilitated structure turn into a loose, wooden skeleton with a tattered roof and a yard full of scattered planks and beams.
A lifetime of working construction, combined with COPD and brutal emphysema stopped him from making any meaningful progress on the house’s demolition or efforts to find work. Other factors, such as the loss of his old Chevrolet truck or any other vehicle that could’ve hauled away debris limited much more than his ability to clean up the place.
Childress, a former waitress who had her own disabilities such as a broken back, could only do so much to help him. They tried to do little things to clean up the place, like planting a row of flowers on the front of their home. When he got his strength up and could reasonably breathe, Brinkley could mow the front of the lawn. Both of them knew the house could be torn down in a day and the property cleaned if only they had a team of men to help.
“Trust me, I want it to look good,” Childress said. “I’ve got how I want it to look in my head. It’s just getting there.”
Brinkley, a slender and quiet man, wanted to reply to Nextdoor messages that accused the couple of squatting, but didn’t. He grew up on the property and still owns a 1/12 interest to it, through the will of a family member.
Decades ago, when the house’s flaking green paint was fresh and its walls and roof still intact, Brinkley’s grandmother raised him there when he was a baby. She was a tobacco farmer and owned much of the land in the area.
Brinkley worked in the tobacco fields as a kid, earning 35 cents an hour and trading in his quarters for a 16-ounce bottle of Pepsi at corner stores. He returned to his family’s house again and again after calamitous losses in his life, such as the deaths of his two former spouses.
“I don’t got nowhere else to go,” Brinkley said. “I’m on social security now. I can’t afford to pay rent anywhere else.”
Because the couple have no running water, air conditioning, and rely on a generator for power, they spent most of their time in the camper so they can stay out of the heat. Brinkley and Childress usually wait for a monthly social security check to come through so they could go out, charge their phone, and buy food and supplies.
When asked about Brinkley and Childress, their neighbors told stories of a mysterious, curly-haired man who walked up and down Broad Street from his home, often lugging a wheelbarrow full of gas cans or other supplies.
Brinkley’s most immediate neighbor, who wished not to be named, said that he was mostly on friendly terms with Brinkley and Childress. But the appearance of their property had pretty much ended his ability to put on yard sales, which people wouldn’t attend anymore.
Up the road, Bill and Kelly Newsom of Bill’s Bargains, a home goods store, remembered Brinkley heading up on foot to the shop to buy ice coolers. His mode of transportation devolved over time from his Chevrolet truck, to a moped, to the wheelbarrow with a rope tied along to it, they said.
Most nights Brinkley and Childress said they have hamburgers and hot dogs for dinner, cooked on a grill. Brinkley buys mountains of dog food for “Dollar,” his 150-pound pitbull that watched over the property. Their dream is to tear down Brinkley’s family house and build a tiny home on it.
But Brinkley’s inability to comply with the county’s demolition order poses an existential threat to his presence on the land.
It has also become a key question for those who want to clear the property.
“When somebody has no money and no motor vehicle, it’s hard to answer the practical question of ‘How do you hold somebody accountable?’” said Minor Barnette, a Forsyth County environmental assessor who has dealt with Brinkley’s property on and off for about two years.
Brinkley and Childress are one of 7,000 households in Forsyth that don’t use the county’s garbage collection service, a statistic that Barnette and county staff must constantly monitor for solid waste violations.
Brinkley and Childress were right to think that the house could be demolished in one or two days, Barnette said, but that process would typically cost in the ballpark of $10,000 to $15,000. When Brinkley heard that he had to tear down his family home himself, it saddened him.
“I don’t have the heart or the strength to take it down,” Brinkley said.
Through the years, county staff eventually reached a point in which they had to resort to seeking a misdemeanor criminal summons to get Brinkley to appear in court for violating the county’s solid waste disposal code. But Brinkley failed to appear, causing a judge to issue an order for his arrest in April, which would put him in jail with a $500 cash bond.
When told about the order for his arrest on Aug 23, Brinkley said he had no idea about it.
But Brinkley’s potential arrest isn’t even his biggest problem. That came in the form of a letter from an attorney sent on Aug. 19.
The letter informed him that the property on which Brinkley currently lives is now owned in majority by a real estate company named Eastjeff LLC, who has decided to sell it at a public auction.
A court-ordered administrator, George Payne, said that there is currently no set date for the sale, but that it could take place in several months. Eastjeff LLC’s attorney, Steven Smith, did not respond to requests for comment.
A sale and the introduction of a singular property owner could help streamline the county’s efforts to get the house demolished. But it could also deprive Brinkley of a home.
In 2022, the beginning of the county’s effort to deal with the property, the county’s staff sent out letters to all of the heirs they could identify. Most of them said on the phone that they didn’t want anything to do with the property, or Brinkley.
But now, most of those heirs had sold their share to Eastjeff LLC. But because there’s still a lack of clarity as to who is the sole owner of the property, whom the county would ideally work with to demolish the house, the process of dealing with the demolition order has been held up, deputy county manager Kyle Haney said.
When the sale of the property takes place, the proceeds will be divided to each co-tenant, which means that Brinkley will get a share.
Brinkley, however, doesn’t understand why he can’t stay on the land that his family left him in a will. With nowhere else to go, and more than a years’ worth of work trying to demolish his family’s home himself, he has accepted the call to fight for his home.
“I’m gonna stay here as long as I can and fight it,” Brinkley said.
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