Mystery Solved. Wait till ya hear the explanation.
www.sptimes.com...
On Wednesday, the mystery was solved.
The poster-sized framed portrait of Lance Cpl. Andrew J. Aviles, and the bricks that surrounded it, turned up in back of a DOT maintenance yard in
east Tampa. "It was a miscommunication. We did not think we had pulled up the memorial but it was on one of our crews' trucks and we didn't realize
it," said Kris Carson, a spokeswoman for the Florida Transportation Department.
Harvey Hunt, a state maintenance engineer, walked into the yard and saw the missing picture Tuesday. He knew right away it was Andy Aviles.
The portrait was at the end of a line of handmade memorials and real estate boxes DOT had plucked from roadsides. The concrete memorials could damage
a car, Hunt said.
That's why a maintenance crew picked up Andy Aviles' memorial. It had become a safety hazard, Carson said.
Initially, she said DOT didn't take it. But that was a mistake, she said. It had been in the back of a crew's truck.
Three years later just when Bush comes to town it's now a roadside hazard.
And some chucklehead even wrote a letter to the editor saying he didn't think it belonged there anyway. Being a vet myself this is the kinda person I
would love to throttle with my own two hands.
