Hello, my name is Ryan McLaughlin. I am an aspiring musician and entrepreneur. My mother, Courtney McManus, and I are fighting restlessly to redeem and relinquish our family's Small Business that was essentially tarnished and stolen from us.
Here's my story...

In order to paint the appropriate picture to put this scenario into perspective, I must explain the company and family origins.
It all started with the man you see in the photos, my grandfather, John J. McManus, the epitome of a hard-working, self-made, family man and entrepreneur. After serving as a paratrooper in WWII, John met and fell in love with a Polish immigrant, my grandmother, Halina. Throughout the 50's, they traveled across the Eastern part of America to eventually land in St. Louis, MO. Together they had four children throughout the 60's; Karen, Laura, Courtney, and "J." 
Being the natural born salesman John is, he began selling automotive parts and electrical industrial components out of the trunk of his car. Working diligently for decades, John was able to move up the chains to ultimately own large garages out of which he operated business. 

Fast forward to 1996, John launched Missouri Transformer and Switch, LLC. (M.T.S.), assuming the role as President. M.T.S. specializes in electrical industrial equipment refurbishment and resale. John purchased a warehouse the size of a city block in North St. Louis on Tyler St. and Broadway Ave. At this point in time, Halina was Vice President, my mother, Courtney, assumed the role as Secretary, and J. was lead engineer and head of sales. For the later half of the 90's into the early 2000's, business was booming. M.T.S. was well known and respected throughout the Greater St. Louis area and was accredited for helping other up-and-coming businesses, donating to local churches, and even supplying the notorious City Museum with a lot of its electrical needs and abstract interior designs.

Unfortunately, in the summer of 2004, my grandfather passed due to cancer of the esophagus. This was the beginning of the falling out of our family and business. Shortly after, his second daughter, Laura, passed from an asthma attack, subsequently sending my family, especially my grandmother, into a tailspin. Only confusion and instability ensued from this consecutive tragedy...
Halina would then presume role as President, however, she was in no position to handle the business at this moment, so the seat was left open. 
My mother also took a short sabbatical from the business to raise her 3 teenagers, one of which being myself.
From the years 2004 to 2009, J. was running the business, but in a distant manner and maintaining a vague communication with the family.

In 2009, my step father passed, leaving my mother to raise three children, again. She had no choice but to pick back up where she left off with M.T.S.
Upon returning, she was shocked to find that the $100,000+ left in the business account was depleted to $80, none of the back taxes were paid, and the utility bills had piled up. Not to mention, the majority of the inventory was missing, not sold, and the customer index was wiped off of the computers. My mother immediately removed J. from the business due to neglect and embezzlement.
He left without hesitation, considering all of the damage was done.
Enduring some of the hardest years of her life, Courtney tried to resuscitate the dying business for the next few years, but to no avail.
In the Fall of 2015, my mother and us three children were evicted from our home where I spent my entire childhood. We hurried to move as many of our personal belongings that we could fit on a few truck loads down to the warehouse for storage. Less than a month later, the City of St. Louis foreclosed the property, despite my mother having the requested amount of $60,000 from fellow business partners and friends, to keep the building. She was wrongfully evicted from her own property due to J's mismanagement and complete carelessness for the business.

At this time, a multimillionaire, Indian doctor, responsible for bringing in a large surplus of Fentanyl into the city, was in the process of purchasing a plethora of property along the river front. He was highly interested in our location because the city was planning to build a new football dome within those parameters, offering more than the asking value of said locations.
However, the football dome plan fell through, so the situation easily could have been avoided. This man slandered my mother in court, claiming that she threatened him with a firearm, which is far from the truth.
In doing so, the court reduced the eviction process time frame from two weeks (legal) to TWO hours (Illegal). All of our personal belongings are still locked in that warehouse to this day. We essentially had to start completely over.
This series of unfortunate events lead to my mother, my two siblings, and myself being homeless and separated. We acted on survival instinct and all found somewhere to live individually and carry on with life.
Being the fighter at heart that my mother is, she didn't give up on the family legacy and pursued justice to be served.

Circling back, we discovered that only a week after John had passed, his son J. fraudulently used his father's name and the M.T.S. warehouse as collateral to pull a $300,000+ loan to purchase his own location; unbeknownst to the rest of the family. This is where the inventory and customers were slowly being funneled to, under a new business that he had created titled J.E.M.
After thorough investigation for nearly the entire decade of the 2010's, we discovered more and more illegal activity committed by J. and his wife/accomplice, "D."
Not only did J. illegally impersonate his own father, his wife D. created a false identity of my grandmother as "Halina K. McManus"; that is NOT my grandmother's legal name. She was signing ~$5,000 - $7,000 checks to herself as Halina, thus draining the bank account slowly over time. She also opened a credit card in Halina's name and put her $10,000 in debt - which we are still facing to this day. Furthermore, D. was acquiring my mother's child support payments for the last 4 years, preventing my mother from receiving her rightful disability due to a car accident she was in around 2007.
Turns out, after developing a hard drug addiction and the possibility of being under an immense amount of stress, my uncle J. decided to just walk away from his new, massive warehouse around 2015.
The doors were literally left open to the public, which was naturally vandalized, looted, and weathered; giving it the ominous, dilapidated state that it is currently in.
My mother and I have teamed up to revitalize the company business and unveil the truth in all of this wrongdoing to help alleviate the turmoil and tensions within the family. We filed a judgement against J. for $800,000. This was the determined amount by our lawyer that was owed by J. to M.T.S. after 10+ years of theft, prevention of business, and flat out embezzlement.
Once in the clear and having property managerial rights to the new location on Euclid Ave., we got to work on securing and cleaning up the mess left behind, yet again by J. 
I stepped up and took the role as Treasurer of M.T.S. and my mother became President. I provided the funds to reinstate the dissolved business, costing about $1,500. Considering the new property was approaching its fourth year of accumulated back taxes, it was at risk of being seized by the City, just as the last location was. 
In the summer of 2019, I took it upon myself to pay one year's back taxes of $11,998 to keep it available for at least another year. 
Now that M.T.S. is more or less resurrected from the dead, the lawsuit/judgement was valid. Knowing that it is virtually impossible for J. to pay the $800K owed, we negotiated that if he simply signed over the title of the warehouse to M.T.S., which was last appraised at $600,000, we would eliminate the remaining $200K.
My mother and I are clearly not in this to make anyone's life harder or out for money. In J.'s eyes, the building was already a thing of the past, so he wouldn't be losing anything by signing it over.
As suspected, he was hesitant because he could not fathom the idea of his sister, Courtney, "winning", or coming out the victor. Pressure was applied to J. and his lawyer, facing incompetency for prolonging the process.
On April 20th, 2020, he finally signed the title over to us. We created a federally chartered nonprofit organization titled "The Skylar Thyme Organization", in which the building is currently under ownership.
We named the organization after my sister's child, my mother's very first grandchild, the cute stinker in the provided photos, Skylar Thyme B.

With the condition the warehouse is in and our lack of funds, there was no possible way of getting  a business license to operate out of the new location, let alone the building passing inspection. So all of the newly discovered and rightfully acquired inventory, or what's left of it, sits in the warehouse now because we cannot conduct business at this location.
I personally have dedicated the last two years of my life and sacrificed more than I ever imagined to this nightmare of a project. Earning no income for the endless hours I've invested into cleaning, organizing, and securing this property, in the midst of a pandemic, this was singlehandedly the hardest thing I've endured in my entire existence.
I do not wish any of this struggle, uncertainty, depression, worry, etc. onto my worst enemies. Working in freezing cold conditions with no electricity, no running water, no proper ventilation, and in the most dangerous neighborhood of North St. Louis, this is the very antithesis of a normal working life. I don't think I'll ever truly recover mentally and spiritually from this endeavor, but I'm keeping a positive mindset through it all and hoping that closure is right around the corner.

The reason I am asking for $40,000 is because the City filed suit on my property three months earlier than they legally should have. In September 2020, the City insisted that the only way to prevent the property to going to Sheriff's auction is to pay the grand total of $36,000, as opposed to the yearly $12,000 - which I was about to pull another loan to secure another year. I have exhausted all of my resources and spread myself thin being $20,000+ in debt, none of which was my wrongdoing, but from cleaning up after someone else's. I fear that if I do not come up with the $40,000 by May 1st, that everything I have invested in and sacrificed for the last couple years will be all for naught.
I'm desperate and this is me admitting it and relying on asking strangers for help.
If anything, the funds will also be used to pay for a retainer on a good lawyer to hold this up in court while we prove ourselves in the right, once more.

My ultimate goal is to acquire the necessary funds to allow me more time to find a faithful purchaser of the property who is more equipped to fix up and utilize the building. After selling the building, I wish to divide the proceeds amongst the rest of the family to ensure everyone can pursue their own hopes and dreams.
My dreams include building an in-home studio to record fellow musicians and to help me promote myself from part-time to full-time musician. I currently play bass guitar in the St. Louis native band, The Greater Good.
“Whatever you do in life - do it for the greater good.”
That's my motto and I'm living by it!

Achieving the desired goal would mean the world and some to me, my mother, and the rest of my family. It means our lives could possibly return to normal. It means we would all be able to sit down again as a family and put the past behind us. It means the next chapter for my mother and I in our entrepreneurial ways.
I would have my faith in humanity fully restored.
There's plenty more to this story and even about myself, but this is the shortened version of it...

If you could find it in your heart to help a family in need, I ask that you please donate whatever you can, because every dollar helps more than you know.
Thank you for reading.