When wounded soldier couldn't get around his house students decided to build him a better one

27-year-old Iraq war veteran Jerral Hancock, sitting on an electric wheelchair, and members of Operation All The Way Home(OATH) chant their slogans after a meeting at Lancaster High School on Monday, Oct. 21, 2013, in Lancaster, Calif. The seniors in Jamie Goodreau's high school history class learned Hancock was stuck in a modest mobile home for months, unable to travel the 70 miles to the nearest VA hospital in Los Angeles to have his bedsores treated or his rotting teeth fixed. Goodreau's students, who each year raise a few thousand dollars for veterans, decided to make Hancock their cause. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) (The Associated Press)

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Volunteer Rose Sliepka removes a flag after a yard sale held to benefit Jerral Hancock, a 27-year-old Iraq war veteran who lost his left arm and is paralyzed from the waist down in a bomb explosion in Iraq, on Saturday, Oct. 26, 2013, in Lancaster, Calif. The seniors in Jamie Goodreau's high school history class learned Hancock was stuck in a modest mobile home for months, unable to travel the 70 miles to the nearest VA hospital in Los Angeles to have his bedsores treated or his rotting teeth fixed. Goodreau's students, who each year raise a few thousand dollars for veterans, decided to make Hancock their cause. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) (The Associated Press)

Jerral Hancock, a 27-year-old Iraq war veteran who lost his left arm and is paralyzed from the waist down in a bomb explosion in Iraq, is silhouetted as he gets on a van outside his mobile home on Monday, Oct. 21, 2013, in Lancaster, Calif. The seniors in Jamie Goodreau's high school history class learned Hancock was stuck in a modest mobile home for months, unable to travel the 70 miles to the nearest VA hospital in Los Angeles to have his bedsores treated or his rotting teeth fixed. Goodreau's students, who each year raise a few thousand dollars for veterans, decided to make Hancock their cause. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong) (The Associated Press)

LANCASTER, Calif. – When Jerral Hancock came home from the Iraq war missing one arm, with another that barely worked and a paralyzed body that was burned all over, he was a hero to the Mojave Desert town of Lancaster, Calif.

When he got home, however, he would be forgotten by all but his two young children and his parents.

That was until the students in Jamie Goodreau's U.S. history classes learned about how he got stuck in his modest mobile home for half a year when his handicapped-accessible van broke down. Or how some of his home's hallways were too narrow for his wheelchair.

It's six months later and the students have closed escrow on a $264,000 property, and the community is pitching in to help build it.