The HOA financial investigation that Wesley and Saskia helped me track through the same period revealed Sloan had been billing the Pinebrook Estates HOA twelve hundred dollars a month for community-safety-patrol consulting through her personal LLC for thirty-one straight months. Thirty-seven thousand two hundred dollars in embezzlement. She took an additional state plea on the twenty-third of July for embezzlement. Six months at the Trumbull County Correctional Institution. Three years’ probation. Full restitution to the HOA. A permanent ban from serving on any Ohio common-interest community board. Holden Calhoun filed for divorce on the second of August. He moved out of lot fourteen on the fourteenth. The house was sold in November at one hundred ten thousand dollars below the 2020 purchase price.
The Pinebrook Estates HOA elected a new board in late August. The new president is a sixty-four-year-old retired Killbuck Valley public-school principal named Magnus Witford. Magnus drove out to our property the first Saturday of September with a casserole and a handwritten apology from the new board. He sat on our porch with Hazel and me for three hours. He formally apologized for the previous board’s three-year failure to address Sloan’s behavior. He told me, in plain Holmes County Mennonite-adjacent English, that the new board had repealed the eleven self-serving bylaws Sloan had passed across her presidency, and that the HOA would be a quieter neighbor going forward. We have hosted Magnus and his wife for Sunday dinner twice since. Magnus has not crushed any trash cans. Magnus has, in fact, driven past my mailbox without incident on every Friday morning of the past twelve months, because Magnus drives a 2007 Toyota Camry at fifteen miles per hour past my property line at all times. Magnus is, by every observable measure, the kind of HOA president Holmes County small developments are supposed to have.
The bollard remains at the road. The fiberglass cover sleeve was replaced after the Escalade impact with a new sleeve I welded the following Tuesday. Same pattern. Same color. Same fit. The cover sleeve has been replaced twice more across the past year, both times due to normal weather wear rather than impact. No vehicle has struck the bollard since the fifth of April, 2024. The trash cans get collected every Friday at 9:15. The trash-collection driver, a forty-one-year-old Holmes County native named Bram Halverson, knows the story. He waves at me when he stops for the cans. He always asks how the bollard is holding up. I always tell him the bollard is holding up.