Stacey Bruno says she’ll never forget the generosity of a local businessman, who offered the family a place to stay after hearing about their story
NEED TO KNOW
- Stacey Bruno, her husband and their two children evacuated their home in New Orleans a day before Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and traveled by car to her parents’ place in Minneapolis
- After hearing about their story, Greg Lawrence, a local businessman, offered the family a home to stay in rent-free for a year
- The Bruno family has since returned to New Orleans and Stacey and her husband Harold have welcomed two more kids
Stacey Bruno still remembers the very long drive from New Orleans to Minneapolis that she and her family undertook 20 years ago as they were fleeing the city one day before Hurricane Katrina struck.
“We didn’t know if we were gonna be coming back, but we didn’t bring much at all,” Stacey, 46, tells PEOPLE, which first covered the family’s ordeal in September 2005. “We had nothing but just the clothes on our backs and whatever we had in our suitcases.”
At the time, Stacey, then 26, and her family — husband Harold, 31, and their two children, daughter Tiara, 8, and son Harold Jr., 6 — considered waiting out the storm at home. But their growing uneasiness made them decide to travel to Minneapolis, where Stacey’s parents lived…