I called Wesley on the morning of the twenty-third of February, 2024. I told him in twenty minutes. He listened the way he listens when he is working a problem at the Ohio Department of Transportation. He said at the end, “Dad, there is a legal solution and there is an engineering solution. The legal solution is going to fail because she has a defense argument. The engineering solution is going to succeed because physics does not negotiate. Install a permanent property-protection bollard. The Ohio Revised Code permits any property owner to install permanent fixed structures within their own property line. The bollard does not have to be marked. The bollard does not have to be visible. The bollard simply has to exist. When she next strikes what she thinks is a trash can, she will strike a piece of structural steel anchored eight feet deep in concrete. The Escalade will lose. Physics will win. The case will close itself.” I told him I had already been thinking about it. He laughed. He said, “Dad, you taught me at fourteen that physics always wins. I am just reading the manual back to you. Build the bollard. Use the documented twenty-three incidents as evidence of the vandalism pattern in advance. Put the documentation in writing with Sheriff Brewster the day before installation. The legal record will show that the property protection was a reasonable response to documented, repeated, deliberate vandalism. You will not have legal exposure. She will have a destroyed Escalade.”
I drove down to Holly Brewster at the courthouse on the morning of the twenty-seventh of February. I presented him the full documented incident folder. I told him I intended to install a property-protection bollard at the trash-can position. I asked him to file a written acknowledgment that the protection installation was a reasonable property-owner response to documented vandalism. Holly read the folder for thirty minutes. He filed the acknowledgment. He signed the document. He gave me a copy. He said, “Quinn, I have been waiting two years for you to find a solution that did not require a Holmes County jury. The bollard is the right answer. Build it strong. Make sure she cannot unhit it. Document the installation. I will support the file.”
I went home after the courthouse meeting with Holly on the twenty-seventh of February. Hazel was in the kitchen baking bread. She had been a Mennonite girl by upbringing. She had retained, throughout our forty-one years of marriage, the quiet certainty that careful work mattered more than fast work. She looked at me across the kitchen island and said, “Quinn, tell me.” I told her. She listened. She set down the dough she had been kneading. She wiped her hands on her apron. She said, in her measured Holmes County voice, “Quinn, build it strong. Build it right. Build it so it will be there when our grandchildren tell their grandchildren about the day they came to visit Grandpa and Grandma after the Cadillac met the welder.” I laughed. So did she. She came around the island. She kissed me on the forehead. She said, “Wesley would want to help. Call him tonight.”
I called Wesley that night. He had me on speakerphone with Saskia in their kitchen in Akron. The two of them listened. Saskia, the high-school chemistry teacher who had married Wesley in 2013, said, “Quinn, my students are going to read about this case in five years in our Ohio civics textbook. Just so you know. Tell us when you are pouring concrete. We are driving down.”