Pinebrook Estates was built across our south property line on Township Road 167 in 2017, on what had been the Beachy family dairy bottom, which an out-of-town developer purchased in 2015. Thirty-six homes on lots between half an acre and one acre, around a small community pavilion. The development was marketed primarily to Akron and Wooster commuters. The development had been quiet through 2018 and 2019. Sloan Westbrook Calhoun and her husband, Holden Calhoun, moved into lot fourteen in March of 2020 with their three school-aged children. They had paid six hundred eighty thousand dollars cash. Holden was a regional sales executive for a Cleveland-based industrial-equipment distributor. Sloan had been a Wooster commercial real-estate marketing director for fourteen years. She had quit the marketing job within ninety days of moving to Pinebrook. She had told her new HOA neighbors that she was focusing on community leadership and quality-lifestyle priorities. She drove a white Cadillac Escalade ESV with a vanity plate that read SWC1. She got herself elected HOA board president in October of 2021 by a vote of twenty-six to seven. She had run on a platform of elevating Pinebrook’s brand and aesthetic standards. She had won because most members had not voted at all in an off-year HOA election in a thirty-six-home community where most of the residents commuted to Akron or Wooster for work.
Her morning routine across 2022 and 2023, by the standardized observation of every neighbor along Township Road 167, was the same routine. She left her driveway at exactly 7:28 a.m., five mornings a week. She drove east on Township Road 167 toward downtown Millersburg. She turned south at the intersection with State Route 39. She arrived at her Pilates studio at 7:40 a.m. The drive took twelve minutes. The drive took her past my mailbox and my trash cans at the road. The Holmes County trash-collection service picked up at our township on Friday mornings between 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. My trash cans, the standard ninety-six-gallon black wheeled cans the county issues to every rural household for seventy-six dollars per unit per year, were positioned at the road every Thursday evening for the Friday pickup. The cans were inside my property by approximately two feet from the edge of the public right-of-way, as measured by the county-marked right-of-way monument my father had set in 1991.
Township Road 167 itself is the kind of small Ohio rural road that has not changed materially since 1972. The road is two lanes, fourteen feet wide each, with a small rumble strip on the eastbound right shoulder the county installed in 2008 to alert eastbound drivers approaching the State Route 39 intersection a half mile east of my property. The road carries approximately one hundred eighty vehicles per day in a typical week, with a small uptick on Saturday afternoons during the Holmes County Antique Festival season in late September. The road has a posted speed limit of forty-five miles per hour. Most local drivers travel between thirty-eight and fifty-two. Sloan Westbrook Calhoun, by the careful averaging across my twenty-three documented incidents, traveled at approximately thirty-one miles per hour past my property on her Friday-morning commute. The thirty-one was unusual. Most drivers entering the eastbound rumble-strip section slow to twenty-eight or twenty-nine. Sloan held her speed. Sloan held her speed because she had her right wheel deliberately positioned on the rumble-strip line. The rumble-strip line, by my own ODOT-trained son’s later analysis, ran exactly fourteen inches inside my property line in the section directly in front of my mailbox. The rumble-strip line was the structural infrastructure on which Sloan had built her routine. She had been using the county-installed rumble strip as her own directional positioning device for striking my trash cans every Friday for eighteen months. The county had inadvertently provided the targeting aid. The county did not know.
She crushed my first trash can on the morning of the fifteenth of April, 2022. The Escalade’s right front wheel rolled over the can at approximately fifteen miles an hour. The can was destroyed. The plastic shell split along the molded seam. The wheeled chassis was bent past repair. I had been on the front porch with my coffee. I had watched the entire incident at a distance of approximately forty yards. Sloan had not stopped. She had not slowed. She had not waved. She had driven on toward Pilates as if nothing had happened. I had not, at that first incident, assumed any malice. I had assumed a moment of distracted driving. I had walked down to the road. I had picked up the pieces of the can. I had ordered a replacement from the county the following Monday. The replacement had arrived in two weeks. The replacement had cost me seventy-six dollars.