Bullies who claim they are the victim
Last week Stuff ran a story that started:
Leah Gibson and Carl Watters have both been charged with trespass for using an access way that crosses their neighbour’s land and say they and their kids have been reduced to sneaking off the property at night. The neighbour says they knew what they were buying into and he’s offered them a fair agreement. Tony Wall reports on a case of neighbours at war.
My first instinct was sympathy for them. Of course they should be able to use an access way, and the Police involvement seemed over the top:
One morning in late January, Leah Gibson drove down the steep, winding track that she’d always used to leave her idyllic property nearDovedale, Tasman.
She and her toddler daughters, Millie, 3, and Lacey, 2, were off to dentist and doctor’s appointments in Richmond.
When she got to the bottom of the drive where it joins Win Valley Rd, she found two police cars and four officers waiting. They pulled her over.
“They said, ‘We’re actually here to arrest you’,” Gibson recalls.
At this stage you , like me, are outraged that a mother with toddlers is being arrested merely for driving down a track. But as I read the full story, my sympathies changed:
According to the couple, relations with him were initially good, and there were tentative discussions to formalise the existing right of way in their favour.
But last year the parties began arguing over the issue of stock grazing on the access way – Mirkin would close the three gates across his section of the track even when none of his stock were present, the couple claim.
Watters says he retaliated by padlocking the gates open; he claims Mirkin then cut the locks and padlocked the gate shut; at which point Watters cut the new locks and at one point took a gate from its hinges.
This is the point at which my sympathies changed. It is Mirkin’s property and access way, and they were padlocking the gates open, and cutting off the padlocks the owner put on, and removed a gate. The sense of entitlement seemed high.
Gibson and Watters believed the conditions were unreasonable – there was a ban on heavy vehicles which they needed for their farm and forestry block, visitors couldn’t use the drive without Mirkin’s written consent and they had to pay him $100 a month, which they claim is “extortion”.
$100 a month doesn’t seem like extortion to me. Seems pretty reasonable.
A follow up article, confirms my suspicions that the couple claiming they were victims, were not. It reveals:
- The previous owner of the property with the accessway (who they claimed they had no problems with) said “They are by far the most difficult and entitled people we have come across in 27 years of living and farming in New Zealand”
- They built their house without Council consent
- Refused to pay a builder who won in the Disputes tribunal
- Refused to pay a digger operator who won in the Disputes Tribunal
- Refused to pay someone who did earthworks
- Refused to pay a logging contractor
- Refused to pay another builder who won in court
- Their pig dogs have attacked sheep
- Watters is now disqualified from owning dogs
- Watters has multiple criminal convictions
Good to see Stuff follow up the original story.