Moving nightmare comes with a happy ending

LAUREL — New Laurel United Methodist pastor went through a rough moving process to get here.

“Nightmarish,” said Pastor Patrick Broz. Imagine having to move and finding out the “moving company” is holding personal items for ransom.

This actually happened to Pastor Patrick Broz and his wife Pastor Abby. Both are ordained Methodist pastors and made the move to Northeast Nebraska at the beginning of June.

In the Methodist Conference, about 350 pastoral moves are coordinated each year. The Bishop, the head of the conference, decides when it is a good time to move a pastor and bring in a new one for a church.

In late April 2021, Pastor Broz was told he would be serving in Laurel. Usually, pastors are told several months before they move to a different church but this was not the case.

“It wasn’t until the first week of May that the move was processed to the point where we were allowed to find a moving company,” said Broz. Since it was so short notice,

Since it was so short notice, Pastor Broz and his wife could not go through one of the conference’s preferred moving companies. He had to find an outside moving company. “We were really in a bind to

“We were really in a bind to get here on time,” said Broz, “This summer, a lot of people are moving, in general, mostly because of covid.”

Broz said he and his wife looked into doing it themselves with a U-Haul, but many people have been renting U-Hauls as rental vehicles. This is happening since it is so much cheaper than renting a van.

“There is a shortage of standard moving vehicles so the only other option was to search online for an interstate moving company,” said Pastor Broz, “The conference helped us make arrangements with an ‘All Coast Moving Company.’”

The “All Coast Moving Company” turned out to be a moving broker, not a moving company.

“Since this is not something I do all the time, I did not know what to look for,” said Broz, “But if we would have known it was a broker we would have not used it.”

Pastor Broz had to be in Laurel on a Friday, so they asked the movers to come on that Thursday.

When the crew did not show up, Broz and his wife went ahead without their stuff.

Leaving their belongings in the hands of their old church, the moving crew finally came the following day.

Pastor Broz then got a text message from the crew leader saying their stuff was on the way.

Pastor Broz was also sent a picture saying the two guys in the photo were the ones to drop off their belongings.

This is where things got tricky for the Broz couple and the Methodist Conference.

“The company started to demand more money but in cash or a non-traceable way,” he said. “I continually told them ‘no’ and tried to act like our belongings weren’t of value to us, so they couldn’t use that as leverage.”

Broz said they filed a police report, but that didn’t seem to bother the movers any as they did not reach out for two weeks, yet they persisted in asking for money when they did make contact again.

“With any moving company, they have to be associated with the U.S. Department of Transportation,” said Broz, “We filed a complaint there too, but found out there are over 10,000 cases a year of ‘Moving Hostage.’”

Since they weren’t getting anywhere and the company kept demanding money, they finally decided to file for an insurance claim.

“Insurance companies have really good private investigators to prove people aren’t committing insurance fraud,” said Broz, “Within a week of filing for insurance, we got our stuff back because of their (investigative) people.”

This was not the end, however. When the Confidant Crew showed up at the Broz house, it was not the same people Pastor Broz was told it would be and they demanded more money.

“They demanded $600 to move furniture in because of the stairs,” said Broz, “$150 per flight of stairs. The first one came free so that was the two steps into the house and the other four ‘flights’ of stairs in our house added up to $600.”

He told them no more money and that they could just put everything into the garage.

“If we didn’t get our stuff back, we would have been fine with getting new stuff through the insurance,” said Broz, “The thing is, you can replace furniture but not the memories or the drawings your kids made.”

While they did eventually get their belongings returned to them, it was not a cheap move. The Conference ended up paying over $20,000 for the move — three times what people usually pay to move, Pastor Broz said.

“When we got our stuff it had damage to it. These people aren’t professional movers, they are professionals at taking personal belongings hostage,” said Broz

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