MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (WKRN) – It’s the simple things many of us take for granted, like getting in and out of bed or taking a shower all by ourselves, that paralyzed Army Sergeant Bryan Camacho hasn’t been able to do in years.
‘But, thanks to the nonprofit Homes for Our Troops, the solider now has a brand new home in Murfreesboro, with special amenities to help.
The Murfreesboro community welcomed their new neighbor on Saturday morning.
This homecoming much more encouraging than the last one 12 years ago when Sgt. Camacho returned from Iraq.
Camacho was first injured in 2007 as an Infantryman deployed with the 10th Mountain Division in Iraq. He was paralyzed from the waist down when his vehicle ran over an IED.
Slowly recovering in the U.S., Camacho was in another accident in 2014. His adapted truck spun out o ice and rolled, paralyzing him from the neck down.
“Five years ago, get a call two in the morning that he was in an accident all the way up in St. Louis,” Camacho’s friend Liam Cronin said in the ceremony Saturday, “Drive up the next day and spend the next day, and spend the next week sleeping on a hospital cot beside him.”
Cronin is Camacho’s friend from middle school and is now acting as his caretaker.
“It’s been a slow process of watching my best friend of twenty years kind of deteriorate because of not having facilities to take care of him ya know in a way a human with any dignity should be taken care of,” Cronin said, “Even the prospect of giving him a proper shower like a real human would get, for the first time in about five years is absolutely huge.”
Homes for Our Troops provided Camacho with a brand new, mortgage-free home, featuring more than 40 special adaptions such as wide doorways, a roll-in shower, and pull down shelves.
This home is the nonprofit’s 285th house given away across 42 states.
Camacho was even greeted by a special celebrity guest, Wynonna Judd.
“Home for Troops, we take home and give it to a soldier who’s been injured in the line of duty,” Judd told News 2, “So, we are here to celebrate the human spirit and to give this man a chance to heal.”
Camacho chose Murfreesboro after living near his first duty station at Ft. Campbell in Clarksville.
Homes for Our Troops currently has 84 projects in need of funding to complete.
