Help the Posey Clan fight for their dream!

“I’ve been to prison, boy. I’ll burn you out! You’ll pay! You’ll be punished! I’m going to see you arrested!”

Those were the threats that introduced me to my new neighbor. That’s how I met him… as he threatened my family, my home, our finances, our mental and emotional health, and our freedom.

What caused these threats? After waiting four months for the neighbor to move some items off our property, which the neighbor had left on it, my husband moved the item, himself and set it next to our neighbor’s mailbox. He didn’t trash it, discard it, or otherwise damage it. He just moved it off our property and set it next to the neighbor’s mailbox for the neighbor to pick up.

However, before we bought this property, it had always been “Recreational” land with no one living on it; the neighbor had free use of it to dump the trash, graze his livestock, hunt, or do whatever he wanted on it and considered it as his land because of this usage. So, he wasn't happy when we bought the land to develop and build a homestead on it. He wanted things to stay as they always had for him before. We wondered why they didn’t buy the land to ensure that before we did… but they didn’t; we did to live on it and exercise our rights to do so. And for that crime we have be subjected to a nightmare orchestrated by this neighbor and I just cannot understand how things have gone so bad for so long and so far. How did we get here?

The picture above is my husband and I in the town parade one year, when we were volunteer “street cleaners” for the city where we lived. There was a wonderful elderly lady who kept getting tongue-tied and mess up calling the volunteers “Street walkers” instead of “Street cleaners.” Not taking ourselves too seriously and having a sense of humor, we all got T-shirts with that and made it our “thing” for the parade that year. We had lots of fun helping out our community, in ways like this, and loved helping others to enjoy themselves, to laugh, and to just make great memories, always.

When we moved to find acreage to give our children room to thrive and grow, we envisioned being about to do the same in our new community. We imagined being able to have good neighbors to lean in and help with or do whatever was needed to give back and help people out. I had ideas of turning our small, yet, roomy, property into a local youth camp location, over time, or to offer summer kid events to the local area. I had so many naive ideas when I we moved here, never once thinking my neighbor would do everything, they could do to ensure none of that ever happened.

Since the night he came and threatened us and our home, our neighbor and various members of his family, have made several false reports to the local law enforcement, making false accusation after false accusation in an effort to fulfill his threats, beginning the very night he made the threats. After coming to our property and threatening us, he went home and called the sheriff’s office to falsely report that my husband “pulled a gun on him” and stated he wanted my husband arrested for it!

3 Deputies showed up at my home, highly alarmed, and encircled my husband, ready to arrest him and take him in for harassing a “harmless old man” (the neighbor is in his 80’s and uses his age to appear frail to and gain sympathy from law enforcement and the judges, but he was not so “frail” or “weak” when he threatened us). Luckily, something spoke to me when the neighbor was threatening us, so that I was moved to video record the incident on my phone and was able to show the deputies this video when they came to arrest my husband.

After they watched the video, the deputies agreed my husband had committed no crime (neither had he “pulled a gun” nor would it have been a crime had my husband done so, as the neighbor was on our property threatening us and our home) and went to speak with the neighbor. My husband asked that they not arrest the neighbor as he was elderly and was trying to be compassionate in case the neighbor was having medical issues or whatever could be going on to cause him to behave the way he had towards us. Unfortunately, our compassion and kindness would be rewarded with further false accusations.

After the deputies spoke with the neighbor and let him know the incident was recorded and there was no crime, the neighbor was not happy and did not accept the deputy’s determination that there had been no crime committed by my husband. The next day he began making surveillance reports about what my husband was doing on our property. Not satisfied with being unable to catch my husband doing something he could report him for and get him arrested, the neighbor began pulling his family members in to make false reports or come onto our property and harass or make further threats against us.

We kept trying to work things out with them, wanting to get along. But any request by us towards them to change anything to accommodate us living on the property (e.g. “please do not hunt on our property, now that we live here and have small children playing in the yard at times” or “please stop driving through the stream on our property as a short cut to the county roadway, as this is causing damage to our property, the culvert that runs under the county road way. Instead, please use one of the other 2 routes across our property to reach your home.”) or any attempt by us to exercise our property rights around their access routes into their property (such as cleaning up abandoned junk and debris) prompts calls to the Sherrif, with false claims that my husband has done something to them, that he hasn’t done.

While we can prove him innocent, as we could the first night the neighbor came and threatened us, unfortunately, despite what we’re taught, the system does not treat one accused as innocent until proven guilty. It’s the other way around in practice. Due to their prior experience with the criminal justice system, the neighbor knew this, well, and, with several family member’s help, rapid fired several accusations against my husband, all at once, with them all swearing to be witnesses to “crimes” my husband had done against my neighbor.

At the same time, they’ve also hit us with a frivolous easement suit, claiming that when we asked them to stop using 1 of 3 access routes onto our property, due to damage they were causing our property and the county roadway, that can be used to reach their property, we were trying to block them from accessing their property, entirely, so they claim they need an easement for the third route to reach their home. They do not believe us that the other 2 routes are also on our property and we have a right to ask them to use those, so they are trying to force the third route so they can force their way onto our property, and by using the Protection Order they obtained against my husband under false pretenses with false accusations, keep us off that part of our property and unjustly enrich themselves with the free use of roughly 3 acres of our property.

We’ve tried to defend ourselves and fight back against the execution of my neighbor’s threats against us from when we met… hold out for our home, for our dream to build something for our children we could pass down -an ideal to live a simpler life and fill days with gardening, outdoor activities and just enjoying the beauty that surrounds us. But the neighbor’s winning.

He has successfully executed on most of his threats. The emotional toil of fighting false accusations and financial burden of fighting an easement suit that’s meritless is making us pay… we are being punished, unjustly. The neighbor has defamed and slandered my husband so much that now, when the neighbor makes false reports against my husband, the deputies do not even speak to us to investigate another side. They just take the report and have the prosecutor file charges so we must defend against them. More time… more money... more ways we’re paying and being punished for just buying land and wanting to develop it to live on.

Yes, as you may be thinking – we have thought of moving and would love to now… despite the time and money we’ve put in here, we’d move if we could. But we have no funds anymore to move.

These legal issues they’ve brought to make us pay, quickly drained all the money I’d saved for infrastructure improvements on the land (putting in septic, a well, etc.) as we’ve had to pay $6k retainer for easement suit lawyer, up front, which is now gone, and I still own another $5,600 in fees. We also needed to get a survey done during the winter… in a mountainous area, which cost another $5K, to try to address things and show innocence. I don’t have the money for a down payment on a new place to buy, nor the money to pay any moving cost or costs to get set up somewhere new, now.

We can’t even sell or leverage the property, for a loan, right now, due to the pending easement suit. So even though they obviously want us gone, we can’t leave due to how well they’ve executed on the threat to make us pay.

They are still working on trying to get my husband arrested and make good on that threat. They have also threatened us with an entirely unrelated lawsuit that we had nothing to do with the events of, but again… they want us to “pay” and be “punished” and are exploiting anything they can find to do so.

They don’t plan to stop either. They will keep going until they somehow make good on getting my husband arrested, financially ruining us, and destroying our lives here so we will leave and run away.

We can’t fight them alone anymore. We need help. I need help.

I need to pay the growing easement lawyer bill and the bills/fees from false criminal charges. I need to pay the normal bills and daily living expenses to feed and take care of my family. I need to find money to get the property's infrastructure soon. Continuing to have to haul water while waiting for funds to get on the list to have a well dug, isn’t helping with the cost of fuel these days. A septic system would help cut tank pumping fees, obviously, too. These infrastructure costs, we were prepared for and have planned and set aside funds for, before our neighbor began acting on his threats. Then it all drained away…

If we were able to get help with all this, our plan would be to use the funds raised to fight these false charges (so we COULD move some day and not have my husband seen as a “flight risk” for answering the false charges they filed), to get the easement suit resolved so the property can be sold. We can move, eventually, to get basic infrastructure on the property so it can be sold easier (and so we can live on it more cost-effectively while waiting to resolve things, sell and move), file any available recourse/restitution lawsuits (defamation, slander, etc.) to get funds back, if possible (for ourselves and anyone who wanted it who had helped us out), and then to be able to sell and move from here to somewhere else, where we might begin anew, once more. Hopefully, this time, it will be the dream instead of a nightmare.