FORT DODGE, Iowa — The dream of two Fort Dodge business owners turned into a nightmare Thursday when someone set fire to their merchandise.
It happened inside the store Fear to Dream/JustLikeThatKicks, a clothing and shoe shop created by Taj Lowery and Dreyzon Phillips back in 2022.
The chaos started with an early morning call from a neighbor that something at the shop wasn't right.
"When I pulled up, it was just heartbreaking, really, when I seen it and everything was burnt up," Lowery said. "Just smoke damage. I couldn't, I didn't have a key to get in at first, so we were just really looking through the broken glass to see, like, what happened."
Surveillance video shows exactly what happened. A masked intruder breaks the front window, comes into the store and uses what looks like a blow torch to start lighting clothes on fire.
The mystery here isn't what happened but who did this and why.
"I don't know why ... He wasn't, like, really trying to take anything. He just came in to, I guess, see us fail," Lowery said. "But that won't happen. We'll come back better."
That comeback may be challenging.
The building itself was insured, which will help cover repairs to reopen. But as for inventory, Lowery said most of it was lost to the fire.
"And we didn't have business insurance. So that was a huge hit," he said. "But the community is really helping out on coming forward a lot to help us out. So that's, we're very thankful for that."
In the community where they were both born and raised and chased their dream to open this business, Lowery said he and Phillips will make sure Fear to Dream rises again out of the ashes.
So far, a contractor has volunteered to do some work and a lot of donations have come through GoFundMe and Venmo.