She filed a civil lawsuit against me in Holmes County Common Pleas Court on the eleventh of April for negligent installation of a roadside hazard. Wesley drove down from Akron the next weekend to help me with the response. We had eighty-one pages of documentation ready by Sunday evening. The documentation included the twenty-three security-camera videos showing the prior vandalism pattern. Holly Brewster’s eleven written sheriff’s reports. The documented prior trash-can replacement receipts totaling nine hundred twelve dollars. The engineered design drawings of the bollard, certified by Wesley as an ODOT-registered professional engineer. The Ohio Revised Code citations on permitted property-protection installations within owner property lines. The county right-of-way survey showing the bollard was eighteen inches inside my property line and not in the public right-of-way. And the Holmes County Sheriff’s pre-installation acknowledgment letter from the twenty-seventh of February. We filed the response on Monday morning.
Holmes County Common Pleas Judge Cordelia Halverson held a pretrial conference on the eighteenth of April. The conference ran twenty-eight minutes. Judge Halverson reviewed the documentation. Judge Halverson asked Sloan’s Wooster attorney whether his client had pursued any legitimate civil action against me for the prior vandalism incidents she had documented, since the defense theory would have implied she had been an accidental impactor, which would have implied prior accidental impacts that should have been amicably resolved. The attorney conceded his client had not. Judge Halverson granted my motion to dismiss the lawsuit. Judge Halverson also referred the entire incident folder to the Holmes County Prosecutor’s Office for review of potential vandalism charges arising from the prior twenty-three documented incidents.
The Holmes County prosecutor, a forty-eight-year-old career prosecutor named Anakah Brewster, Holly’s older sister, a coincidence I appreciated, filed misdemeanor vandalism charges against Sloan on the second of May. Twenty-three counts of vandalism in the fourth degree under Ohio Revised Code section 2909.05. Sloan took a no-contest plea on the seventeenth of June. Sixty days in Holmes County jail, suspended on completion of probation. Eighteen months’ probation. Restitution of nine hundred twelve dollars to me for the prior trash-can damage. Fifty hours of community service. And an additional eighteen thousand dollars in civil restitution under a separate civil judgment Judge Halverson entered the same week for emotional distress and continuing harassment damages.