The first thing that hits you is the cloying residual smell of tear gas, chalky and hard to swallow, like an old chewable vitamin.
People are also reading…
Natasha Iverson looks out over the space that used to be her twin daughters' bedroom. A bullet hole, at left, remains from where an armed gunman, Alexander Grunke, shot himself after bursting into the family's home April 10.
Natalie Iverson, 17, with her mom, Natasha, left, points to where she saw an armed man in her backyard on April 10 as she took shelter in the second-floor master bedroom with her 3-year-old brother, Ryker Gallagher. The intruder broke into the family’s home, barricading himself in the basement, where Natalie’s room is, and was later found dead by suicide.
Natasha Iverson describes how Alexander Grunke shot his way into the family's home last April. The doors pictured are new; the shooter's bullets shattered the old ones.
Just minutes before Alexander Grunke broke into their house, Natalie Iverson, at left with her sister Cassandra, had been napping on a couch a few feet away. The basement has since been gutted to try to remove the residual smell of tear gas police used to try to force Grunke to leave.
After Madison-area architect Phil Ashby heard the family’s story at a conference, he knew he wanted to help. After going back and forth with the family, hearing their visions for a new home and seeing their Pinterest boards, he drafted a plan pro bono.
Iverson and Natalie with their cat, Chewie, in one of the two trailers the family is living in now. Through all the trauma and headaches, the little orange cat with the perpetual grimace has been "a highlight," Iverson said.
A bullet hole is still visible on the back side of the bathroom wall. On April 10, Alexander Grunke broke into the home, barricaded himself in the basement and later died by suicide. "That's his kill shot," Natasha Iverson said.
Grunke entered through the backyard gate before breaking into the home. "I heard the gunshot and I heard her scream and I thought, 'He got her," Natalie recalled thinking of her mom as she hid from the gunman upstairs.
Iverson, Natalie and Cassandra at their family business, Quarry Kennels, which is right next to their home. The girls typically work at the kennels on holidays, but being there has become more difficult following the trauma the family sustained.
While the walls upstairs haven't had to be stripped, all of the furnishings have been removed while the family settles on next steps for repairing and remodeling the house. They hope to move the girls' bedrooms up from the basement, the site of so much trauma.
Cassandra and Natalie only recently started living on the property again, staying in trailers after having spent the summer and early fall staying with relatives and friends.
The family received their belongings back from investigators in September, but dealing with them and the scent of tear gas they still carry has been difficult, Natasha Iverson said.
Belongings that could be salvaged now sit in storage units on the driveway of the family's home. But many items still reeking of tear gas have ended up in a dumpster.
Cassandra and Natalie let the dogs out of the trailer in which their mom is living, in the backyard of their home. The girls share a trailer next to this one.
