Donation closet reopens at Yuba City church after a fire shut it down for months
YUBA CITY – Crossroads Community Church in Yuba City provides a donation closet free of charge for anyone who may need clothes, shoes or household items. But it's been closed for the last few months due to suspected arson.
The Clothes Closet has been part of the church for more than three decades. It all started in a cramped room that you had to duck into.
"It expanded and people kept bringing donations and coming for the needs that they had," said Clothes Closet manager Charlotte Vestal.
Then the church moved the donation closet into a trailer. But in November, it went up in flames.
"There was another man up here on the porch with a lighter," Vestal said while showing the burnt deck of the trailer.
The church says some bags of clothes were left by a donor outside of the trailer when two men rode up on bikes, scattering the clothes and lighting them on fire.
"The clothing caught on fire, one of the windows was broken open. So we had to move our facility to another location," Vestal said.
Since November, the Clothes Closet manager and volunteers have been working tirelessly to open another space in a storage unit around the corner.
"It shut down for a while. You can get towels here, socks, just everyday stuff you need. There's a lot of people that didn't get a lot of clothes because of that," said Yuba City resident Lisa Bishop.
"It's more organized and it's working really well," said volunteer Norman Stadel.
Volunteers say the new space, which is double in size, is making a huge difference. They've only been open for about a week and people are already coming by daily.
"Before, the men would come in and they'd just be going through it looking, and sometimes they found something, sometimes they didn't. This way they could go by their sizes," Diane Welch, a volunteer, said.
"It's by God's grace we're able to help these people and it was devastating to be closed for as long as we were closed," Vestal said.
"It helps a lot of people, I think. It's really good. They don't get enough credit," said Live Oak resident Donna Clark.
CBS News Sacramento reached out to the Yuba City Police Department about the investigation, they say there are no updates.
