Business owner installs AC unit for free for teen in hospice care

By Bridget Chavez

Click here for updates on this story

    PORTLAND, Oregon (KPTV) — 13-year-old Viktoria Leen has an infectious smile and a beautiful spirit. However, in the last couple of weeks, her health has taken a turn. Her mom, Lea Leen, said she spent three nights in the hospital.

“There’s nothing more they can do for us so we just brought her home,” Leen said. Viktoria is now on hospice care and her family is doing everything they can do make her comfortable in her final days. The family is already dealing with the unimaginable and to top it off, their air conditioner broke just as the Portland area reached the highest temperatures of the year. Leen said their home was unbearable and it wasn’t just because of the outside temperatures. The machines Viktoria needs produce a lot of heat and need to be kept cool.

“She does not do well with heat on a good day,” Leen said. The family was desperate to get it fixed and that’s when a friend connected them to Sam Murzea, the owner of MP Heating & Air Conditioning.

“I received that phone call and I already had a full schedule but after receiving more details of the call my schedule became wide open for it to get taken care of first and foremost,” Murzea said. He said the family’s AC unit was more than 25 years old and beyond repair. He told them it needed to be replaced and would cost about $12,000. Murzea and his team came the next day and replaced the whole thing, but Lea didn’t expect what was at the bottom of the bill.

“He said he’d email me the invoice and asked me to open it and it was zero,” Leen said. Murzea said he knew all along that he wasn’t going to charge them for whatever services they needed.

“That was like all the payment I ever needed and she deserves it more than anybody,” he said. Even his employees offered to do the work for free that day.

“I think something that’s bigger than all of us put us there and there’s a reason we got that phone call and were able to be in the position that we were to help them,” Murzea said.

Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.