In the weeks between the bollard impact and the formal civil hearing, the Holmes County community processed the case in the slow, steady way Holmes County processes incidents that involve careful Mennonite-adjacent reflection on right action. The Killbuck Mennonite Church, where Hazel and I had met in 1979, and where we had continued to attend services across forty-five years, held a discussion night in late April on the topic of lawful self-protection in the face of repeated low-level vandalism. The discussion was led by our pastor, Eldrid Witford, who had pastored the church for twenty-two years and who had known both Hazel and me since 1985. The discussion ran two hours. The discussion was attended by sixty-three members. The discussion did not, by Eldrid’s careful framing, address our case directly. The discussion addressed more broadly what a Mennonite-adjacent rural community owes itself when one of its members is repeatedly targeted by a non-member. The discussion concluded with a vote of seventy percent in favor of a community statement that lawful structural property protection is consistent with Mennonite-adjacent values of stewardship and proportional response. The statement was published in the Holmes County Trader the following week. Eldrid read the statement aloud to the congregation the following Sunday. Hazel and I stood with the congregation. We did not speak. Eldrid said after the reading, “Some weeks our community speaks softly. Some weeks our community asks careful questions and answers them slowly. This was one of those weeks. We are stronger for it.” I did not cry in church. Hazel did. The congregation pretended not to notice. Holmes County is a polite place.
The story brought significant new customer interest to my fabrication shop. The Wooster Daily Record ran a feature on the case in late June. The Akron Beacon Journal syndicated the article the following weekend. WKYC Channel 3 sent a Cleveland television crew to interview me at the shop in July. The story aired during the six-o’clock news broadcast on the fourteenth of July. By the end of the year, I had built fourteen additional residential property-protection bollards for other rural Ohio homeowners who had experienced similar HOA-related vandalism patterns. The bollard installations have spread across Holmes, Wayne, Stark, Tuscarawas, and Coshocton counties. The most distant installation is a small bollard on a Coshocton County mailbox for a retired schoolteacher whose neighbor had been knocking down her mailbox post weekly for nineteen months. The schoolteacher’s mailbox post is now a four-inch schedule-80 steel pipe anchored in two cubic feet of concrete. The neighbor has not knocked it down since. The neighbor has, by the schoolteacher’s later report, started waving at her in the morning.
Holly Brewster retired from the Holmes County Sheriff’s Office in October after twenty-eight years of service. His retirement party was at the Killbuck VFW post. One hundred forty Holmes County residents attended. I gave a four-minute toast. I told the room about the two-year file folder Holly had built across the trash-can incidents. I told them about his careful patience. I told them that the bollard had only worked because Holly had documented the pattern thoroughly enough for Judge Halverson to dismiss Sloan’s lawsuit and refer the case to the prosecutor. The room applauded. Holly wiped his eyes. He took a part-time job as a school resource officer at the Holmes County Joint Vocational School two months later. He patrols the building where I taught for thirty years. He stops by the office four times a week to talk with the current welding instructor and to look in on the seniors in the program. He has, by his own quiet account, told the welding seniors the bollard story approximately a dozen times. The story has become small infrastructure in the welding program’s annual orientation. The seniors learn the story alongside their safety equipment and torch handling. The story is, by every measure, the kind of story careful welders should know.