She crushed the second trash can on the morning of the twenty-second of April, 2022. The third on the twenty-ninth. The fourth on the sixth of May. The fifth on the thirteenth. By the end of May 2022, she had crushed five trash cans in six Fridays. The pattern was unmistakable. The first crushing had not been distracted driving. The first crushing had been the establishment of a Friday-morning ritual. The ritual continued.
I called the Holmes County Sheriff’s Office on the morning of the twentieth of May, after the fifth crushing. The deputy who came out, a thirty-seven-year-old officer named Holly Brewster, listened patiently. He looked at the trash-can debris. He measured the position of the cans relative to the right-of-way monument. He took notes. He told me, in the careful Holmes County deputy voice, “Quinn, I cannot file vandalism charges without proof of intent. I need video. Get video, then call me back.” I told him I would. I installed a small motion-activated security camera at the mailbox the following Saturday afternoon. The camera was a Lorex unit I had bought from the Wooster Best Buy for two hundred eighty dollars. The camera covered the trash-can position with a clear angle on any approaching vehicle. The camera also covered approximately forty feet of road in each direction. The camera recorded thirty-second clips with date and timestamps. The clips uploaded automatically to a cloud account on my phone.
The first recorded crushing was on the morning of the twenty-seventh of May. The footage was unambiguous. The Escalade was traveling at approximately thirty-two miles per hour as it approached the trash-can position. The Escalade’s front-end angle changed at exactly two car lengths from the trash can. Sloan had deliberately steered to the right, off the center line of the road, to ensure that her right front wheel would strike the trash can squarely. The wheel struck the can at the calculated angle of impact. The can shattered. The Escalade continued without slowing. The Escalade was visible in the frame for approximately fourteen seconds. I filed the first formal complaint with Holly Brewster on the thirtieth of May. I provided the video. I provided the GPS coordinates of the trash-can position. I provided the measurement showing the can was two feet inside my property line. Holly reviewed the video. He filed an incident report. He contacted Sloan. Sloan denied intentional contact. Sloan said the trash can had been in the road and that she had been unable to avoid contact. The video footage showed otherwise. Holly filed the report as disputed contact. Evidence supports complainant. He could not, by Ohio standards for a first-incident vandalism with a vehicle, pursue criminal charges without a higher threshold of either repeated incidents documented under direct law-enforcement observation or aggravated circumstances. He told me on my front porch, “Quinn, I am going to keep this file open. If she does it again, send me the video. We will build the case.” I told him I would.
She crushed the sixth trash can on the morning of the third of June. The seventh on the tenth. The eighth on the seventeenth. Across the period from the fifteenth of April, 2022, through the twenty-second of March, 2024, a span of one hundred one Fridays, Sloan Westbrook Calhoun crushed twenty-three of my trash cans with her Cadillac Escalade. Every incident was on video. Every incident was reported to the sheriff’s office. Every incident produced a sheriff’s report filed under the same incident number. Holly Brewster, by the end of 2023, had a file folder an inch and a half thick. The file folder was the most thoroughly documented residential vandalism case in Holmes County history. The file folder was also, by Holly’s careful conclusion at our porch meeting in February of 2024, not enough to convict a Cleveland defense attorney in Holmes County court on intentional-vandalism charges, because the Escalade’s right front wheel made contact with the can within the same dimension every single Friday, and the defense would argue that the contact was the result of the right-side rumble strip on Township Road 167, which Mrs. Westbrook Calhoun consistently drove over. The rumble strip was real. The rumble strip did not, in fact, push the wheel into the trash-can position. But the defense would argue it. The defense would create reasonable doubt. The case would not convict.