(Liz Klimas) Joe Del Rio’s story starts off two years ago. The 72-year-old man from East Austin, Texas, was woken up at 7 a.m. on a Saturday in May 2010 by a local SWAT team and fire department at his door. Why? To investigate a multilevel bunker under his home.
In the years following, Austin’s American-Statesman reports, Del Rio’s home has been condemned by the city as uninhabitable; he’s been served a $90,000 bill from the city to make the street on which he lives “safe” again (his bunker apparently made the street’s structure unsafe); and more recently set out to sue the city for unconstitutional seizure of his property without compensation.
