A good friend of mine lived three doors down from this fellow until she moved about six months ago.
We were talking about this around the time it happened, and from what she said this article is just a bit . . . slanted. The guy was a little odd, had fought with all his neighbors, and his house was a dump since he let the chickens inside. He had not only chickens but turkeys, and he had lots and lots of them, far more than the zoning allows (I think you can have six). Needless to say there were complaints, which he ignored, and then the city and the code folks got involved. There was a long battle, he got cited, fought it, lost, got probation, he violated probation, went to jail, his house went into foreclosure . . . . which all apparently pushed him over the edge.
Any time you live close to other people, there have to be some rules so that what you do on your property does not bother your neighbors. We are not exactly Yard of the Month candidates ourselves, so I do have some sympathy for this man, but if he really wanted to live with farm animals in the living room, he needed to move to a 20 acre parcel rather than stay in a densely populated suburban neighborhood where everybody else had to put up with it.
He could have worked this out, but the combination of intransigence and imbalance was fatal.
Well, there’s more of that hearsay. Other neighbors and friends tell a completely different story that your source relates.
The “six chicken” limit was a “new law” the city came up with after going after him and being put off. If you read the column, it explains that and the fact that he was “grandfathered in.”
Knowing the propensity for abuse of power that petty dictators at all levels have, I tend to take all of the points of this story together to see a terrible injustice perpetrated by these little mini-tyrants in Roswell.
Just how many people were in his living room putting up with it besides himself?
Article states his property was 2 acres, that's a fairly large piece of ground for a hundred chickens.
BTW, I live in a small, ruralish town, and driving down the street to my house entails an obstacle course of cats, dogs, kids, and yes, chickens. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Word is the foreclosure involved the town buying his mortgage so they could abuse it.