GoFundMe has shut down a viral fundraiser for an 81-year-old The Colony delivery driver and refunded donors after finding the organizer was not who the page claimed.
Donald “Don” Johnson gained national attention after doorbell video showed him carrying lost airline luggage up a steep staircase. He has worked as an independent contractor returning delayed bags from the DFW area, sometimes on 14-hour days, after his wife, Josephine, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The couple has been married nearly six decades.
A campaign launched Sept. 2 under the name of a neighbor, “Erin Howell.” It raised more than $281,000 before the takedown, FOX 4 reported. Some later accounts put the total above $700,000. Don told the station he hoped the money would let him stop working.
GoFundMe said a Sept. 25 tip led Trust & Safety to conclude the organizer who presented herself as neighbor Erin Howell was actually the couple’s daughter, Amy Johnson, the New York Post reported. The company said that was a factual misrepresentation of the organizer’s identity and relationship to the beneficiaries, a terms-of-service violation regardless of intent. All donations were refunded under its Giving Guarantee.
Amy said the video, the job, the diagnosis, and the bills are real. She said she used a neighbor persona because she thought the story would connect better coming from outside the family, that a neighbor who wanted to stay anonymous provided the doorbell clip, and that she used an existing GoFundMe account and changed the name. The company said she acknowledged on a recorded call that she posed as a neighbor.
After the page came down, Amy opened a new fundraiser on GiveSendGo under her own name, writing that refunds were frustrating for donors and the family and that her parents still need help with care and with getting Don off those stairs.
The dispute is over who ran the original page, not a finding that Josephine’s illness was invented. Donors who want the money to reach the family would have to give again on the new site.
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