Posted on 01/01/2009 2:02:45 PM PST by Daffynition
An 89-year-old Cincinnati-area woman arrested for confiscating the neighbor kid's football is now suing the boy's parents. Edna Jester filed a lawsuit in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court claiming she has suffered emotional distress because footballs and other playthings belonging to her next-door neighbors keep landing in her yard.
In October, Jester refused to return a football, was taken to the Blue Ash police station and charged with petty theft. The prosecutor later dropped the case.
The lawsuit against parents Paul and Kelly Tanis seeks unspecified monetary damages.
Kelly Tanis calls the suit "very silly" but says she and her husband also worry because they have five children and can't afford a lawyer.
Did you ever kick a football? If so, did it go exactly where you intended it to every time?
Damn lousy kids...always botherin' an old lady..
/Granny from Any Which Way But Loose... //Right Turn, Clyde.
maybe who likes kids and who doesn’t?
You could be right ... as a society we reject respect for the elderly and other people’s property. Sad.
These people do not seem like monsters to me. If the man was mowing her yard for her and even offered to do so after the friction, it would seem she is the one with the problem.
You post clears things up a bit for me. It is hard to know for sure on these things. There was an article on FR yesterday about a man being arrested for habitually calling 911. It would seem a rock in his yard had been moved 4 inches. I think, in this case, there is enough pettiness and ignorance to go around for all involved. Let her keep the football and keep play items out of her yard.....lesson learned. Unless she is suffering from dementia she will soon realize the family next door is an asset and not a liability.
See my post #12 Granny Rules!
Arrghh. One more time. There's obviously some bad blood between these two neighbors that's not covered in this story. I've had kids, I've had elderly parents. I can sympathize with both, and generally I sympathize with the elderly. But we're talking about a football, that once kicked or thrown or bounces off another kid could just end up anywhere.
The kids could have been ordered to stay off her property, therefore not able to retrieve their "property" from her property. They could have asked for the football back and she refused to give it to them.
Like I said, this article doesn't offer a lot. And I didn't grow up in a suburban hell hole where everybody's is a bad mood, so maybe I don't have the right perspective.
The elderly can be very stubborn esp when they get connfused or scared. most little kids can wrap around their finger if they are nice to “granny” though. Being in your back yard and possibly getting hit by a ball can be serious to the aged though. i put this back on the parents. Trying to make peace after getting her arrested is a little too late. An appology, maybe dad putting up a net or at least letting her know when they would be playing ball would have been better imo. The kids would probably have got the ball back with cookies.
Did you even READ the news item? She’s not suing HER parents!!!
Sounds to me like this is a (very common) situation that occurs in neighborhoods. The elderly woman was likely fed up with the neighbor’s children leaving their toys all over the place (including her yard) so she took a football they left in her yard and put it away. This is to compel the children (or parents) to come and ASK to get it back, giving her an opportunity to remind them (no doubt for the thousandth time) to stop playing and/or leaving their things in HER yard. Instead the parents called the POLICE and had the elderly woman arrested. I don’t care if the old lady is the Wicked Witch of the West, she has private property rights and they were violating them.
As the President of a Homeowners Association, I am frequently asked to intervene in situations like this between neighbors. The most recent one in our neighborhood was to remind a woman whose children ran around the neighborhood with PAINTBALL guns that if her children didn’t stop it (after multiple previous complaints) we would call the police and have them arrested for vandalism. What were the little darlings doing? They were paintballing in the neighborhood, leaving paint on people’s homes, cars, fences, trees, sidewalks, etc. As you might imagine, the mother called me a beeatch (or a similar name) and complained that we are all so unfriendly to her darling children.
Sounds like a whole lot of children need to be told to STAY IN YOUR OWN YARD! It’s not the little old lady who is at fault here...
I read the headline. Its meaning is clear.
What happened to REAL neighbors?
Little kids need big yards to romp and play in.
No evidence of vandalism here. And why are you President of a frickin’ homeowners’ association?
I wondered what happened to real neighbors when my nosy old neighbor called CPS (all unfounded) on my family claiming kids were neglected because they weren’t in school (homeschooled) and were outside unsupervised (my 14 year old was babysitting one day and the youngest ran out). If she had spent half as much time actually talking to us as she did spying on our movements.
The Tanis family needs to contact that guy with the Fox Urine in his super-squirter water gun, I’ll bet he could make the old bat see things their way.
This may be true in certain parts of the country but not all parts. Where I come from we respect the elderly and other people's property and we also realize that kids are kids. My mother in law passed away this time last year at the age of 95. I can't imagine she would act like this lady did. She was more forgiving of children than anyone else on the planet, and hated liberals. :-)
Thankfully we still live in a small town. Kids and grankids were down for the holidays. Neighbor called one day and said she had four of the grandkids. They seemed hungry so she was feeding them, sweets of course. LOL
I have been disabused of that notion.
If I have to make a choice however, I side with grandma.
LOL. Nicely played, sir.
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