Silver Lake restaurant owner pays rent for mother facing eviction

SILVER LAKE, LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Presley Wilson was worried about her April rent. The single mom lives in California Trailer Grove in Pomona with her 4-year-old son and two dogs.

"I was almost a month behind on my rent at that point and was getting very, very nervous," Wilson said.

Wilson had been working as a driver for Lyft, but said she had to stop working once the coronavirus pandemic became a serious threat to those living with underlying health conditions.

Wilson said she suffers from severe asthma which causes her to get bronchitis every time she gets sick and occasionally pneumonia.

She had shared her situation with another media outlet a few weeks ago and it struck a cord with one of its readers.

Shawn Nee is the owner of the burger joint in Silver Lake Burgers Never Say Die.

"I have a boy about her son's age a little older," Nee said. "So that usually resonates with me, and then also just the situation that she was in. It seemed like she's a person who really needed help at the time, or still does. And I kind of had the feeling that, you know, you see these articles often on the internet, and you never really know what happens to the person," said Nee.

Nee reached out to Wilson and sent her a rent check three days after learning about her story.

"I'm incredibly grateful that there are human beings like that out here," Wilson said. "For someone like Shawn to do it, who has had to shut his business down, so he doesn't have that income coming in right now. That's pretty remarkable. That is a very special kind of human being. And I'm just so incredibly grateful to him. And I really hope that more people follow his lead, not for me, but for the other people in their community."