Thursday, Diane sent a letter to every homeowner in Ridgecrest Meadows. I got a copy from Connie Pruitt. The letter described my new gate as a hostile, militarized barrier designed to intimidate our community and urged homeowners to attend a special meeting where the board would discuss legal options to compel reasonable access. She described the biometric system as surveillance technology being used to monitor Ridgecrest families and said she was consulting with state-level authorities about my cameras.
The special meeting was held the following Tuesday. Forty-four homeowners attended. Diane stood at the front of the community center with a printed photo of my gate projected on a screen. She called it Fort Knox on our doorstep. She said the biometric system was proof that this man has something to hide. She proposed a special assessment of eight thousand dollars to fund a lawsuit demanding that I provide the HOA with emergency access credentials to my property. The vote was thirty-one to thirteen.
Thirteen people asked questions. Connie Pruitt was one of them. She asked Diane directly, “Has our attorney confirmed that we have legal standing to demand access to private property that isn’t part of this HOA?” Diane said, “The attorney is working on it.” Connie said, “That’s not what I asked.” Diane moved to the next question.
Meanwhile, something was happening that Diane didn’t know about. The insurance company had not dropped the matter after their initial warning letter. They had assigned an investigator, a woman named Ruth Chandler, to review the HOA’s entire file on the Bain property dispute. Ruth had been quietly pulling records, reviewing meeting minutes, and examining invoices. She discovered that the HOA had spent fourteen thousand six hundred dollars of community funds on the surveyor, Dietrich’s legal fees, the maintenance contractor’s lock-cutting visits, and the special-meeting expenses. All directed at a property that was not part of the HOA and over which the HOA had no legal authority.
Ruth Chandler scheduled a meeting with the full HOA board for the last week of August. She didn’t tell them what she’d found. She just said it was a routine coverage review. Diane accepted the meeting. She had no idea what was sitting in Ruth Chandler’s file, and she had no idea that Detective Tatum’s charges were now approved by the DA and that warrants were being prepared. Everything was converging and Diane was standing right in the center of it, still convinced she was winning.
The week before the insurance meeting, Diane made her biggest mistake. She organized what she called a community safety walk. A group event where Ridgecrest homeowners would march along the boundary fence between the subdivision and my property to inspect the impact of the unauthorized security installation on community safety. She promoted it on the HOA Facebook page, the neighborhood email list, and paper flyers posted at the community mailbox cluster. She scheduled it for Saturday morning. She expected fifty people. About thirty showed up.
I know because my boundary cameras caught the whole thing. Diane led the group along the split-rail fence pointing at my cameras, my gate, and my floodlights like a museum docent describing evidence of an alien invasion. She carried a clipboard. She wore a lanyard with an HOA badge on it. She had brought a bullhorn. For the first forty minutes, the group stayed on the HOA side of the fence. Uncomfortable, but legal. People walk along their own property line. That’s their business.