r/Prorevenge Neighbor Cuts Down MY Tree, Pays $1.2 MILLION! (via r/Legaladvice)

welcome to our slash for revenge which actually today has posts from our slash legal advice that's because our slash legal advice is the only place where you can find posts about three law and yes I understand that this sounds like the most boring topic on planet earth but trust me you guys three law has some of the most epic stories of revenge that you never knew existed buckle up because you're about to find out how tree law can absolutely destroy someone's entire life I live in an older neighborhood in a small town an hour away from Nashville the cost of living in Nashville has shot up as well as property values and some people have begun to move into our sleepy little town to get more out of their dollar a new ish neighbor is an aspiring country singer lives in their own world and seems to have a lot of money this crudely drawn map shows the proximity of our two houses the future Johnny Cash recently built a front porch that includes a fireplace hanging lights the whole shebang Johnny's only source of heard is that I had two old oak trees that cast his deck in shade during the prime hours the map isn't aligned properly he asked me to cut them down even offering to pay but I did not comply when I returned from vacation last week I came home to two tree stumps mashed up grass and a letter telling me to expect a venmo payment for $2,000 I know that trees are well-loved around here but I don't think that this information is common knowledge to all lawyers what should I bring up when I meet with a legal representative to explore my punitive retribution then Opie posted an update about two weeks later a lot has happened in the past 15 days I wanted to provide a brief update but it will be out of order thank you for all the great advice sorry I was unable to comment in the original thread but I am grateful for everything the first thing I did was delete venmo scan and back up the letters left in my mailbox the ones offering to pay for the trees being cut down and the one offering 2k and called for someone from my local town to come and evaluate that the tree stems were indeed on my land but before the land evaluation I wanted to write a quick gospel in praise of my lawyer I drove down to the big city of Nashville and met with some real mean s.o.b I gave him a quick rundown at what happened and he literally quoted the helpful comment made by you / dude rose about harming landowners trees he told me that we should wait to file criminal charges until the stumps were without question on my land so I had a town surveyor visit and this is where the story gets good well he was out making his observation my neighbor came out and wanted to know when I would be taking the payments i curtly said I wasn't yet ready to accept it and he got mad accusing me of being a sucky neighbor and not wanting to help his home he then insisted that he had the right to cut down the trees to which the surveyor confirmed my suspicions and told us no the stumps were actually on my land he could have trimmed branches if they were too long but not cut the lumber down he left in a huff so now I am waiting for Wednesday when the certified arborist will visit and tell me the tree value thanks again for your help the third and final part to this gripping act 3 story is up next the arborist came out this past Wednesday prior to his meeting and this whole mess I had taken trees for granted I simply assumed that you could plant a seed they would grow you cut them down make stuff and the process would repeat but no I was informed by this mystic man of nature trees are far more complex they take years to root some trees need more dirt and ground to establish themselves some are more valuable in certain areas with historical roots to the area some are incapable of growing in neighborhoods if infrastructure has since been built and some trees produce different veneer quality logs white oak trees or Quercus Alba is apparently one such tree that is highly sought-after for veneer quality logs they're used for furniture for banjos here in the South for all sorts of wood crafts and as the magical tree man told me they're freaking tough to grow in neighborhoods their roots don't let them grow in neighborhoods and they shy from urban blue his point is that if you had two white oak trees of veneer quality cut down from your front yard is that they'd be ear replaceable new ones could never regrow to that 100 year old size ever again because of that tree man god of dollars stated that one thousand dollars per year per tree is a base compensation sorry for the delay my lawyer has been smelling blood in the water and wanted to ensure whatever I posted wouldn't put our two hundred thousand dollar tree case in jeopardy and wanted to go over at first dear neighbor I appreciate the check that you wrote me for two thousand dollars however I'm afraid that you forgot to add two zeros to the end of it so for this next story two of the three original posts got deleted so I had to do a little bit of sleuthing and track them down from the wayback machine so as a result the different parts have slightly different colors and fonts but don't worry about that too much that just means I screenshotted them from different websites three weeks ago I asked a tree service if they could provide a quote to cut down a few small trees in my backyard along with a large tree I never set a date never agree to any work just met with them for five minutes to point out the trees and then asked him to leave a quote in my mailbox and I would call them if we decided to use them get home see a quote seems a little high so I'm getting a few other quotes come home this past Monday early from work and I see several large trucks and equipment from the tree company in front of my house I look into my backyard from my truck window and see them cutting away I go running down the side yard yelling at them to stop and asking what the heck they're doing the job Foreman not the same person I spoke to before says they're doing what I told him I tell him I never agreed to any services and my wife had even decided against cutting some of the pines down because she liked the wooded appearance it gave her a lot I tell him to immediately stop and one of their guys goes running to the back yard yelling for everyone to stop I go inside grab the quote and show him it wasn't signed he gets the owner the person I spoke with before the phone and I immediately asked why he came out to my home and just did work I never agreed to him doing emphasize that all I asked for was a quote he seems flustered says he doesn't know how it happened he's really sorry this cycle repeats for about ten minutes on how this has never happened and he doesn't know why he put me down if I didn't sign anything or agree to it conversation ends with his crew cleaning up leaving and him agreeing to meet us at our home that evening wife comes home and cries for a good bit because now we can see clear back to the large road behind us and about half of the pine trees she loved are gone for reference there were about 12 total and they were each 12 to 18 years old about 30 to 45 feet tall guy arrives initially tries to make it sound like it's on both of us that had happened to which I made it clear it was 100% on them and they need to fix it to make matters worse they just toppled the trees off onto the hill behind my fence which runs down towards a public access hiking trail I don't own the land the trees are now on and it's illegal for me to dump them there my wife and I only had about 30 minutes before he showed up from the time she got off work so we didn't have a lot of time to figure out a solution what we came to agreement on verbally and loosely is that we pay nothing he cleans up the cut down trees and he plans a new row of fat growing evergreens like my wife loved in place he then leaves and says he'll call to set a date which he said for the end of this next week however the more my wife and I think about it the more I feel like this isn't the fair shake it'll take another 10 to 12 years for us to get even part of the wooded appearance back that our lot had before and that was one of the primary reasons we bought the house as a final note all of this was caught on the security system of my house and I recorded the conversation we had with the owner when he arrived my questions are this one is this a fair trade - what are our rights or what we rode legally are these trees are there aesthetic appearance to us worth anything legally 3 should I consult an attorney and if so what kind of an attorney do I call for should i cancel the cleanup appointment we have the company until I consult an attorney I'm not trying to make this a payday I just want to make sure they do what's right by us and it especially has me riled up how much this upset my wife she's cried a few times since then when she's looked at the back yard because of it too it was always her dream to live on a wooded lot like her parents did to the point of it being a veto issue when we were looking for a house so then a bit later Opie posts update number one I had an arborist come out and do an evaluation out of the twelve Pines on the lot seven have been removed and another species of tree had been damaged broken in half by the felling of the pines I won't say the exact value here but it was indeed substantial as well I had a reforestation service come out that was recommended by the arborist unfortunately due to the steep embankment it is simply not possible to replant 40-foot tall pines they would never take and it would be nyam possible to acomplish the largest that would have the highest success of implantation would be eight to ten feet tall and would take four to five years after to regain the privacy from the road and development behind us that we had before regardless it was still an extremely high cost to both replant the new trees as well as clear the debris from the old trees off the hillside my attorney sent a letter to the tree company with a demand for triple damages as well as the cost of reforestation I received a deluge of calls and voicemails from the owner which I ignored and sent voicemail copies to my attorney they had a discussion in which the owner is going to turn it over to insurance and let them figure it out he says we had a verbal contract to do work which I deny and I have an unsigned quote and video footage showing I left before he even put the quote in my mailbox I'll post another update once we hear back from his insurance so after getting the insurance claim filed we met with the adjuster who admitted they were reliable but thought our claim amount was ridiculous and unfounded my attorney then showed her the exact law regarding treble damages and market value not being related to the court value which she apparently was ignorant of and she immediately started backtracking and saying they weren't going to accept liability and we're going to argue that there was indeed a verbal contract in place and that's why they did the work my attorney rightfully told them he would play the recording of our meeting in court recordings of my conversations with the owner and had mountains of evidence to support their not being a contract generally ripping her a new butthole the whole time she left and we didn't hear anything for a while and they ignored the time limit on our demand which was reasonable at three times the arborist estimate of twenty thousand dollars so sixty thousand dollars total we filed suit along with a letter detailing our concern about the large trees left behind on the embankment how they might end up sliding down into the protected River and trail below and that we would hold them liable for these additional damages if they should continue to ignore our demand and deny liability in bad faith it got escalated to a new adjuster who contacted us to basically say we'd see them in court while waiting on this to happen discovery is a pain my worst fears came true due to heavy rains the trees that had been cut down and left on the hill leading down to the river pulled loose and slid down to the trail and river they dragged a ton of other plant debris with them caused the embankment to partially collapse and destabilize and left the trail completely blocked with a large blockage on the flow of the river below - from all the debris that fell onto it the collapsing embankment also pulled a portion of my backyard with it and most of my rear fence line that was on it along with causing for other pine trees and our beautiful weeping willow to either topple or partially uproot with the soil the river is also the primary water source for our small town which becomes relevant soon after lucky for me no one was on the trail and so no injuries were involved even luckier for me my attorney was also the firm for the local city and had been keeping them informed since the trees were felled onto their property and how we were trying to get it resolved so they wouldn't come after me thankfully they had been very understanding and helpful even sending out their in-house arborist and engineer to evaluate the city was pissed when the river became blocked called out a major engineering firm and because of my attorneys relationship with them was nice enough to include the damages to my yard fence and trees in their overall assessment of damages since rebuilding the embankment and doing cleanup was impossible without also building back up my yard to my new trees being planted would also help with the long-term stabilization of the new embankment as well the reconstruction and stabilization of the embankment dredging of the river and clearing of the trail all had to happen immediately because of the river being the local water source all told the engineering firm assessment was well over 1.2 million dollars to complete all the necessary work on an emergency need timetable this of course didn't include any resulting damages from the diminished water source having to issue a boil water order city incurred costs etc they would now have to rebuild a series of long-term retainer walls to stabilize what had been before a naturally occurring embankment and completely dredge a protected water source they began work immediately and in return for including my yard construction in their work I allowed them full access rights through my property as much as they needed with the condition that they would include repairing any sod damage in their assessment they began working immediately and it was a flurry of activity we stayed in a nearby hotel because they worked into the night with bright lights and loud heavy equipment and I had to board my dogs for two weeks while it was going on since they couldn't be in the backyard anymore after almost four weeks the work was done and our yard actually looked even better than before all total my case for incurred costs alone was well over a hundred and seventy five thousand dollars not including punitive damages including repayment to the city for the work they had to perform on my property including reciting and grading most of my yard from the equipment use I wasn't told exactly what the city's claim for subrogation was but it was well into the 1.5 million dollar range according to my attorney our attorney did some sort of paperwork forgive my legal ignorance to ask for a speedy court date due to the circumstances after sending all of the updated damages to the insurance company the next day after they received our certified letter and I assume my attorneys Court request we received a call from someone in the office of the president for the insurance company after ignoring us for months they were now back getting us to settle out of court presumably to avoid punitive damages after negotiating for roughly two weeks we settled on just over two hundred and ninety five thousand dollars plus attorney costs out of that after paying what we owed for the city to do their part of the work reimbursing for out-of-pocket costs and our attorney getting their share we ended up with a good amount while it wasn't quite a hundred thousand dollars it was pretty close to it so we were definitely happy with that outcome as for the city they were essentially maxing out what was left of the policy it was a two million policy and then going after the owner and his company for the remaining damages as well as the state going after their licensing and levying fines against them as of last month his company disappeared from my local Google pages and his number no longer works which I presume means that he went out of business essentially what could have been a fair and minor insurance payout turned into the owner losing his company I presume us having a fully reconstructed backyard new trees new fencing new sod an ample savings account and with a nice set of retainer walls and private stairs leading down to the river smiley face so after listening to these reddit posts I think you can understand the moral of this story don't ever ever her God's sake cut down someone else's trees who knew trees were worth this much that was our / / revenge and our / legal advice if you enjoyed this video please be sure to LIKE and subscribe because it really helps my channel out

Channel: rSlash

Views: 1,704,635

Rating: 4.7982817 out of 5

Keywords: reddit, r/, rslash, r\, sub, subreddit, best of reddit, reddit top posts, top posts, top posts of all times, funniest posts, funny, comedy, funniest reddit posts, funny reddit posts, funny reddit, fails, cringe, prorevenge, r/prorevenge, prorevenge posts, prorevenge funny, prorevenge fails, pro revenge, funny pro revenge

Id: R_6BU-X3zog

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2019