The bigger consequences were the social ones, and those were the ones that actually mattered. Doris had been running her little reign of terror on the assumption that she had the whole neighborhood behind her, that she was the law, and everyone respected her for it. What she found out the hard way, in handcuffs in front of everyone, was that nobody respected her at all. They were simply scared of her. The second she got walked to that squad car, the spell broke for the entire street. It turned into a whole thing at the next HOA meeting, which we actually went to for the first time, because before that we had avoided them out of pure dread. There was a real conversation about the board, and about how much unchecked power one person had been allowed to have. Doris was not the treasurer for much longer. You cannot really keep someone on the board after they have been arrested for trespassing onto a member’s property while harassing that member’s kids on a holiday. Even an HOA has limits. Who knew?
Being the HOA treasurer means you balance the books and collect dues. It does not give you probable cause to enter private property, and it certainly does not give you the right to film other people’s children on private property. She called the cops and claimed she felt unsafe because she saw an eight-year-old hunting Easter eggs. She thought she was untouchable because nobody had ever told her no. A former board member put it cleanly later. The bylaws almost certainly give a right of entry for common areas, or for very specific utility maintenance. Absolutely none of them let you walk into a resident’s fenced backyard to police noise. If she wanted to fine us, she could have logged a complaint and let the management company handle it. Going rogue and trespassing on Easter is a fast track to getting the association sued. The board did the right thing by stripping her title.
What still sits with me is the window. My wife checking the blinds before she let the kids out. We bought the house so they could have a yard. Kids are allowed to exist. Kids are allowed to play outside on a holiday morning. No one should feel like a prisoner in a home they spent years saving up to buy. After Doris was gone from the board, the backyard went back to being a backyard. The eggs that had sat in the grass that morning got found the next day, a little soggy, still worth a dollar if you were eight. The youngest asked, once, if the angry lady was going to come back. We told him no. She had been told to go home, and this time she had to.