Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00John Stewart is suing his neighbor, Jack Clark, for destroying his front yard when he cut a branch off his oak tree.
00:08Mr. Stewart, you and the defendant are neighbors.
00:11Yes.
00:12You own your home?
00:13I've owned my home since 2004.
00:15And Mr. Clark, do you own or rent your home?
00:18I own it.
00:19When did you purchase it?
00:20October 2014.
00:21And when, Mr. Stewart, did you start to have difficulty with Mr. Clark?
00:25It was about a year after he moved in.
00:28What happened a year after he moved in, in 2015?
00:31He was growing marijuana in the backyard, and he started trimming some trees that were on my side of the property line.
00:38And I asked him, please don't trim those trees.
00:40And I said, by the way, if I keep smelling the marijuana in my house, in my bedroom,
00:45I'm going to send you a cleaning bill to take care of the smell in my house.
00:49Was the smell coming from the plantings, or was it coming from using?
00:52From the plants.
00:54You know how marijuana has that skunk smell?
00:56I don't.
00:57It's horrible.
00:58When did you start to plant the marijuana in your backyard?
01:01I had never had any marijuana plants in my backyard.
01:03Did you have a discussion with Mr. Stewart about the plants that you had in the backyard?
01:08I believe him, actually.
01:10So if you tell me that you didn't have the discussion with him, I'm not going to believe you.
01:14He said that he was going to sue me for air pollution if he smelled marijuana.
01:18Okay.
01:18So what he was saying to you was something in your backyard smelled.
01:23Correct.
01:23Okay.
01:24Did you try to identify what it was in your backyard that was smelling, Mr. Clark?
01:30I did not know.
01:31Why didn't you try to identify it?
01:34Because I didn't believe that suing somebody for air pollution is a true thing.
01:38No, no. That's not what I'm asking you, sir.
01:39What I'm asking you, Mr. Clark, is if your neighbor comes to you,
01:44and you haven't had any difficulty with your neighbor before,
01:47and says to you, something in your backyard smells and is waffing into my bedroom,
01:54I would go into my backyard and I would say,
01:57what could it be? Maybe the septic system needs cleaning.
02:00Maybe something is wrong with it.
02:02So when I said to you, did you try to identify what it was that Mr. Stewart was complaining about?
02:09You said you weren't growing marijuana.
02:12Did you go into your backyard to try to identify the source of the smell?
02:17No, ma'am.
02:18And I'm asking you, why not?
02:20He's not accurate in saying that was our first conversation together.
02:23So we had already had problems prior to that.
02:25Okay. So then you tell me what your prior problems were with him.
02:30At one point he had stated to me that he moved the fence line,
02:33so he owned eight inches of my property,
02:35and I couldn't trim the trees or lean anything against the fence or touch the fence.
02:39It was all in his control.
02:40So what he said, he built a fence and the fence gave him leeway
02:47so that any trees that were over that fence by a certain amount of space don't touch
02:54because how much did he say again that he owned?
02:57About eight inches.
02:58And what did you say to him?
02:59When I bought the house, the fence was already there. It existed.
03:03Oh, that's okay. I could put a fence up in the middle of my front yard.
03:07That doesn't mean that my neighbor owns half of my front yard.
03:11Correct.