TONALEA, Arizona — Two weeks ago, Chee Secody was laughing.
The 94-year-old Korean War veteran had just gotten electricity into his Tonalea, Arizona, home for the first time.
The thing he was most excited about? Power tools.
“I guess that was more important than his refrigerator,” his daughter Rose Nelson said with a laugh and she translated for him in Navajo during a visit by KSL-TV.
But now, the laughter is gone. A fire tore through Secody’s home earlier this week, burning everything inside.
Many people were worried the fire started because of some electrical problem, but fire investigators say the cause appears to be from his old wood stove. He first noticed something was wrong when he smelled smoke, went outside, and noticed his roof was burning.
It is an issue that had happened to him before, but never this severely.
“He’s going through some emotional distress,” said Sally Charley, Secody’s daughter-in-law, during an interview inside the Tonalea Chapter House Friday. “All his medicine packets are gone.”
Along with his medicine, Secody lost all of his clothes, his beloved power tools, and decades of memories that include photographs of family, friends, and his time serving in the Korean War.
“He’s thinking that an estimate of $150,000 was lost with this burn,” Charley said, who was translating for Secody in Navajo and English.
It would’ve been easy for Secody to give up hope, but his community wouldn’t let him.
“When something happens, we come together,” said John Whiterock, president of the Tonalea Chapter of the Navajo Nation.
Whiterock said the Chapter House is already planning to help rebuild Secody’s home.
“In our culture, we take care of our elders. Especially our war veterans, we highly treasure them,” he said. “We are looking for donations, for materials, for labor, and for volunteers to rebuild his home.”
Secody may have lost his belongings, but he has gained something he never expected: More family.
“He said that he is appreciative to everybody out there with all the help that he’s getting,” Charley said. “Although he is old, he wants to enjoy life with the time that he is still here.”
How to help:
The Tonalea Chapter House is asking for materials and volunteers to help rebuild Chee Secody’s home.
If you’re interested, you can call the Chapter House at 928-283-3430 or email them at tonalea@navajochapters.org
A GoFundMe page* has also been set up to assist Secody with recovery costs.
*KSL.com does not assure that the money deposited to the account will be applied for the benefit of the persons named as beneficiaries. If you are considering a deposit to the account, you should consult your own advisors and otherwise proceed at your own risk.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
