I bought my place about two years ago: five acres of mostly cleared pasture with a creek along the back, a beat-up double-wide on a permanent foundation, and a pole barn that was older than I was. I paid almost nothing for it because the previous owner had let it go and the bank was tired of waiting. The land sits near an HOA development that I will call Retired Dictators Limited, which is one of those fancy-schmancy HOA neighborhoods. Well, my property is not in the HOA and has never been in the HOA. The plat lines are clear, the deed is clear, and the county records are clear, too. I am separated from Retired Dictators Limited by a strip of county easement and a wood fence that I built myself.
For context, I work for the sheriff's office. I have for many years. I was a road deputy when this all started, and I still am. I never broadcast that fact, though, when people ask what I do. I usually just say I work for the county. I've seen too many off-duty headaches come from telling strangers your job to invite that into my home life. Karen, the woman this story is about, did not know what I did for a living. She thought I was just some guy with a tractor.
About the tractor, it's a utility tractor with a front loader and a three-point hitch on the back. I use it for the kind of things you actually need a tractor for out here: hauling gravel up the drive after the rain washes it out and clearing brush along the creek. I also use it for moving around bales for the neighbor across the road in exchange for letting his cows graze my back acre and keep it from going to weeds. It cost me about twenty-two thousand dollars used, and I bought it with savings I'd been sitting on for years.
Now for Karen. Karen is the HOA president of Retired Dictators Limited, and has been for about four years from what I understand. She's one of those people who treats a volunteer board position like it is a federal appointment. The first time I met her, she walked across my field in heels, knocked on my front door, and informed me that I was in violation of the HOA's equipment storage covenant. I told her politely that I was not in her HOA, and she told me less politely that I was effectively in the community because my driveway is visible from one of their cul-de-sacs. I told her that was not how property law worked. She told me she would be in touch. I closed the door.
Well, that was the start of a roughly fourteen-month harassment campaign. The gist of what they told me was always the same: that I needed to build a barn or a screening structure to hide my agricultural equipment from the view of Retired Dictators Limited residents, who apparently were so traumatized by the sight of a green tractor that property values were actively eroding. I ignored most of them. A couple of the more aggressive notices I scanned and emailed to the actual HOA management company along with a polite note explaining that I was not a member of the HOA, had never been a member, and that the president of the board was effectively harassing a non-member from her board email account. I got a wishy-washy reply saying they would look into it, but nothing changed.
There's another character in this, and that is Karen's son. He's somewhere in his late twenties. I don't know if he lives with her or just spends every waking hour at her house, but his pickup is in her driveway constantly. He runs a landscaping business. I have it on good authority that his company has the lawn maintenance contract for the entire Retired Dictators Limited common areas, including the clubhouse, the entrance signs, and the little detention pond. The contract was awarded the same year his mom became HOA president, and I will come back to that later.
I had only spoken to the son maybe twice, and both times he was rude in that way young guys are rude when they think they are talking to a regular civilian and there are no consequences for their actions. Once he flipped me off from his truck after I waved at him to slow down on my road because there are kids who walk to the bus stop. The other time he stood in his mother's yard and yelled across the easement that I was a trash redneck who was dragging the neighborhood down, and I just kept mowing.
Now to the day it happened. I had worked an overnight, got off shift around six in the morning, did paperwork until almost seven, drove home, took a shower, ate a bowl of cereal, and went to bed. I sleep with blackout curtains and a fan running because daytime sleep is hard sleep. I usually don't surface until two or three in the afternoon when I've worked a night shift. I woke up at about two-thirty and made some coffee. I went out the back door to look at the weather and figure out whether I had time to do anything outside before my next shift, and I noticed immediately that my tractor was not where I had left it.
I park it next to the pole barn under an overhang I built specifically to keep the rain off it. The grass where it had been parked was still pressed flat in the shape of the tires. Well, the tracks went down my gravel driveway, hooked left at the road, and continued out of sight in the direction of the entrance to Retired Dictators Limited. For a second, I thought somebody had taken it as a prank. I called the neighbor across the road and asked if he had borrowed it, even though he would never do that without asking. He said no and asked if I was okay. I said I would call him back.
Then, I went back inside, sat down at the kitchen table, and pulled up the Find My app on my phone. About a year before this happened, I lent the tractor to a buddy of mine who was doing some work on his property. He had it for almost three weeks. I did not know where it was for most of that time because we were both busy and he kept moving it between his place and his brother's place. After I got it back, I dropped a spare AirTag into the little compartment under the hood where the manual lives, more as a precaution in case my buddy borrowed it again than anything else. I forgot about it for a few months, and I'm very glad I did, because the app was pinging from the parking lot of the Retired Dictators Limited clubhouse.
So, I sat there with my coffee for a minute, and then I called dispatch on the non-emergency line and asked them to send a unit. I gave the address of the clubhouse, told them I had a stolen vehicle situation, and gave them the make and model of the tractor. I told the dispatcher who I was, and she asked if I wanted to respond to my own scene. I said I would be there as the victim, not as a deputy, and I would let the responding unit run the call. She said two cars were already close.
Then I got dressed in uniform, mostly because I figured if I was going to be standing on scene as the victim, I would rather be visibly identifiable than be some random guy in pajamas yelling about a tractor. I got in my personal truck and drove the half-mile to the clubhouse. The Retired Dictators Limited clubhouse is one of those fake plantation-style buildings with wide columns out front and a circular drive. There's a little ornamental pond next to it with a fountain. The HOA had been planning a summer kickoff event for the weekend, which I knew about only because flyers had been on every mailbox on the road, including mine, even though I was not invited.
I pulled in, and the first thing I saw was my tractor. Sitting in the grass next to the pond with the front loader full of mulch, Karen's son was up on it, in the middle of dumping mulch into one of the flower beds along the front walk. He was using my tractor to do a paid landscaping job for his mother's HOA. There were already two patrol cars in the lot. The deputies were both guys I work with. One of them caught my eye and gave me a small nod. The son had not noticed them yet because he was facing the other direction and the tractor was loud.
I got out of my truck and walked across the lot, then stopped about ten feet from the tractor and waited for him to see me. He killed the engine when he finally turned and saw the patrol cars. He didn't see me yet because I was off to the side. He hopped down with this big, easy smile, like he was about to charm his way out of whatever this was. He started walking towards the deputies with his hands up in that exaggerated, joking way and said loud enough for everyone to hear, "Officers, what can I do for you? This is private community property."
Well, that was when he saw me. His face went through about three expressions in two seconds. First, it was confusion, because he didn't immediately recognize me in uniform and out of context. Then, it was recognition. Then, it was something else—maybe the look of a person realizing the floor is not where they thought it was.
"Hey man," he said. "Hey, what is—what is all this?"
I said, "That's my tractor."
He said, "Yeah, no, I know. I know it's yours, but listen, this is a community thing. I was going to bring it back."
I said, "You took it off my property while I was sleeping."
And he said, "Asset's got to earn its keep, right?"
Think about that sentence for a second. Asset's got to earn its keep, right? He said that about somebody else's twenty-two thousand dollar piece of equipment that he had driven half a mile down a public road in broad daylight, stealing it.
One of the deputies stepped in then and asked him to come over to the patrol car. He started to protest and said, "It's not stolen if it's seized."
The deputy asked him what he meant by that, and he said the HOA had taken possession of the tractor under some kind of bylaw or other regulation, and that he was just operating it on the HOA's behalf.
That was when Karen came out of the clubhouse, walking fast and loud the way she always did when she wanted everyone to notice her. She had a folder under her arm and she started in before she was even within normal speaking distance, her voice cranked up to make sure the whole parking lot could hear her. She said the HOA had lawfully placed a maintenance lien on the tractor due to my ongoing covenant violations, and that they were within their rights to secure the asset for community use until the violations were cured.
I just stood there. The deputies just stood there as well. One of them, who used to work civil process before he came to patrol, looked at me with an expression I will treasure for the rest of my life.
Karen got to us, opened the folder, and inside was a document with the HOA's logo at the top. It was titled something like "Notice of Lien and Asset Securement." It had a date on it from two days prior, a paragraph of legal-sounding language about governance and remedies, and it had Karen's signature at the bottom. Also, it had a notary stamp—Karen's notary stamp. She had notarized her own document.
I looked at it. I looked at her, and I looked at the deputy who used to work civil process. He was biting the inside of his cheek to keep a straight face.
I said, "Karen, I'm not in your HOA."
She said, "You are effectively in the community."
I said, "That's not a legal concept."
And she said, "It is a legal concept. I've been advised by counsel."
I said, "Who's your counsel?" She didn't answer that.
Well, about this time, another guy came out of the clubhouse. He introduced himself as a member of the HOA board. He was an older guy in a polo shirt, looking like he had been pulled out of a meeting, and he asked what was going on here. Karen tried to talk over him, telling him the board had voted on the lien, and he cut her off. He said calmly that he was on the board and he would know if they had voted on a lien. They had not voted on anything of the kind, and in fact, the topic had never come up at any meeting he had attended.
Karen said the vote had happened by email. He said the board didn't vote by email. She said it had been a presidential action under emergency provisions, and he told her there were no emergency provisions in the bylaws.
This entire exchange happened in front of the two uniformed deputies, me, Karen's son, and a small crowd of residents who had started to drift over from the houses across the lot. Karen kept going, though; she really thought she was going to talk her way through this.
The deputy with the civil process background finally spoke up and said very politely that even if there had been a lien, an HOA cannot self-execute a lien against personal property by physically taking it. He said that even if every part of her paperwork were valid, which it was not, the legal remedy would be to file the lien with the county and pursue a court order. He explained that taking the tractor off my property was theft regardless of any paperwork.
And she said, "Well, the paperwork is valid."
So, he asked her if she had notarized her own signature on a document she was a party to, and she said yes. He asked her if she understood that a notary cannot notarize a document on which she is also the signer. And she said, "I'm the president of the HOA. I can notarize whatever I deem necessary."
That was, I think, the moment her son's face actually changed. Up until then, I think he had genuinely believed his mom had this handled. He had been standing there with his arms crossed, kind of smug about it. When she said the thing about notarizing whatever she deemed necessary, he looked at her like he had never seen her before.
Then she looked at me, really looked. And for the first time that afternoon, the uniform actually registered. You could see her putting it together: the badge, the patch on the sleeve, the radio, and the fact that the two other deputies had been talking to me like a peer the whole time and not like a complainant.
She said, "You're a sheriff's deputy."
I said, "Yeah, ma'am."
And she said, "Since when?"
Well, I said, "Since before you bought your house." I'm not going to pretend that was not satisfying.
The other board member asked her if any of this had been run by the actual HOA attorney, and she said it hadn't. He asked her if she had pulled the tractor off my property, and she said her son had at her direction and within her authority. Her son made a small noise that sounded a lot like a man realizing he has just been left holding the blame.
The arrest happened pretty quietly after that. The son was handcuffed and put in the back of a patrol car. The charge ended up being grand theft of heavy machinery plus trespass and unauthorized operation. Karen was not arrested at the scene, but she was charged later for notary fraud and filing a false instrument. She wasn't charged with theft directly because she hadn't physically taken the tractor, but she was being charged with being a party to the offense, which in our state is functionally the same thing. Her son was charged with the actual theft, and while the criminal cases were still pending the last time I checked, the prosecutor's office is definitely not in a hurry to be lenient.
The bigger story came out after the arrest. The board, now operating without Karen, hired an actual outside firm to audit the HOA's books for the last four years. What they found was that the landscaping contract awarded to Karen's son's company had been handed out without competing bids. The contract was being paid at roughly twice the going rate for comparable services in the area. Furthermore, there was a line item on Karen's quarterly statements, paid out of HOA dues, listed as a community advisor consulting fee that went directly to a personal account in her name. It was several thousand a quarter for four years.
The board called an emergency meeting, and the residents voted to remove Karen as president by a margin that was effectively unanimous. The landscaping contract was terminated immediately, and within about two months, the company folded.
About six months after all of this, a real estate sign went up in Karen's front yard. I heard from a neighbor that she had to sell to cover legal fees and the civil judgment that the HOA had filed against her for the misappropriated funds. She moved out before the school year started. I never spoke to her again and I still have the tractor. I now park it in a different spot further from the road, mostly so I don't have to look at the tracks anymore. Every time I pull in, the AirTag is still in the engine compartment. I check on it every now and then, mostly out of habit.
One of my favorite areas to work covered a town that had a big outlaw motorcycle gang (OMG) presence. It was pretty tucked away; no mainline went through it, and there was never really a reason to visit. But the OMG members would pass through the mainline that I patrolled on their way there, and I did my best to make their life hell when I could.
One afternoon, the call came over the radio: "Unit two, attempt to overtake high-speed motorcycle, at least ninety miles per hour." At this point, all I knew was it was a motorcyclist speeding. I was on a two-lane freeway, which makes it hard to get through traffic; I much prefer four lanes to find more gaps. Well, half a mile later, I gave another update to dispatch: "Around one hundred miles per hour. Now, he's lane splitting through traffic, so I'm having trouble keeping him inside. Probably going to lose him. Cruiser-style bike, all-white helmet, black vest, blue jeans." Another thirty seconds went by. "Dispatch, I've lost visual. I'm going to cancel."
I turned around and headed back to my area. A couple of minutes later, my supervisor came over the air and said, "Dispatch, can you send unit two to my location? I've got a motorcyclist stopped that matches the description of the one he was going after."
I met up with my supervisor on a side street about a mile past where I lost visual. He actually had the bike stopped, and I confirmed it was the same one. My supervisor asked, "You got enough to get him for reckless or what?"
I said, "Nah, I got a confirmed ninety miles per hour on radar, and he was moving through traffic, but it wasn't anything crazy. Just going to hit him with the speed."
I went up to the motorcyclist to get his info, and he immediately started yelling. "Who was it? You?" He was angry. "You piece of crap. Want to get me for speeding? You can go screw yourself."
I said, "That's cool. I need your driver's license."
He continued to verbally berate me as he retrieved it and handed it over. "This is some BS. You cannot prove it was me. The judge would laugh at this. I will see you in court, you dick."
I wrote him his ticket and checked him for warrants or parole, but he was clear. I gave him his ticket and sent him on his way. He kept talking about how he was going to fight it and how he would have the last laugh.
When he went to leave, I finally saw that his vest had half the OMG patch on the back. That meant he was not a full member and was still pretty new in understanding how things worked. I knew I would not see him in court. He would report back to the full members, and they would tell him to pay the ticket and move on. OMGs don't want extra attention. They are actually really good at using the law and anything a cop does wrong on a stop to get cases dismissed, which really matters for gun or drug busts, but less so for simple speeding tickets. And just as expected, he never fought the ticket.
Hear me out before immediately saying I'm the jerk based off the title alone. I was hanging out with some friends at a local park when a drunk woman came out of nowhere, starting trouble with one of my female friends. She had two beer cans in her hand and looked poised to throw them. Instinctively, I stood in the way and told her she needed to leave. She started to threaten to hit me with the beer cans and knock me out, but I stood my ground.
She continued to throw verbal jabs at me until she decided to physically throw me to the ground. On my way down, I grabbed her, effectively taking her down with me as she started trying to throw haymakers at me. I managed to disarm and pin her without throwing a single punch. The cops, who were nearby in the area dealing with another issue, came over and informed me I could let go of the woman, which I did. After giving the cops the lowdown of the incident on my end, plus the corroboration of my friends, the drunk lady was arrested, and I was allowed to resume my day.
For some context, I'm in university right now and was just walking to class today when I saw some idiot kid following a family of geese around. The baby geese were running away, and the parent geese were hissing and positioning themselves between the babies and the kid, clearly because they were scared. I'm not really confrontational by nature, but I love animals more than most people. So, I felt like I had to say something. Although geese can take care of themselves, let's be real.
I told him to knock it off, and he said, "What? I'm just following them," in the stupidest voice you can imagine.
I said, "Okay," called him an idiot, and told him he would be attacked by a goose soon.
I walked off and went up to my building where everyone has to scan their student ID to get in. As I was scanning my ID, I saw him in the door reflection. He was running behind me, unfortunately free of a goose attack, presumably to try and catch up so he could enter the building without scanning an ID like many people do. As soon as I was inside, I turned around, pulled the door shut behind me, and watched him stop running and groan as I clearly ruined his plan to use me to piggyback into the building. I just don't understand why he would think me—the person who just called him an idiot to his face—would be the one he could sneak in behind. It was petty, but it felt so satisfying in the moment. Geese are the last animals in the world you should mess with, and honestly, screw anyone who hurts animals.