Trees in man's yard vanish - and so does tree trimmer
Officials can't figure out who ordered the trees to be cut, leaving two neighbors at war with each other.
By BILL COATS
Published June 6, 2003
LUTZ - What Charles Jones saw through his kitchen window last Nov. 19 was enough to make him jump over a fence and pound on his neighbor's door.
A majestic cherry laurel on Jones' property had disappeared, leaving only an 18-inch stump.
"It just staggered me," he said.
Yet Jones had seen only a sample of the changes wrought on his property the day before. A pair of oaks, whose branches had formed a broad canopy over the bank of Lake Crenshaw, had been sawed down in his back yard. Four palms had vanished. On the other side of the house, a second cherry laurel had been removed.
Jones' neighbor, Mike Riddlesworth, paid for the tree removals. He told a Hillsborough County sheriff's deputy it was a misunderstanding that he regretted.
No permit had been obtained for the tree work. Hillsborough County, among other agencies, has searched unsuccessfully for the tree trimmer.
Jones is shopping for a lawyer who'll sue Riddlesworth.
And Riddlesworth, who already owned one of the most lavishly landscaped lawns in Lutz, looks across it now to an open, enhanced view of the 27-acre lake.
Both neighbors own elegant homes at the corner of Little and Crenshaw Lake roads.
In friendlier times, Jones had openly envied Riddlesworth's rock-studded flower beds.
"I told him, if I had the money, I'd love to do that myself," said Jones, 68, a former cameraman for ABC News.
Jones said Riddlesworth approached him on a Sunday afternoon last November to ask about trimming branches from one of Jones' trees, which were blocking sunlight to Riddlesworth's lawn, and Jones consented.
Jones said tree-trimmer Joe Reed, 38, showed up about a week later.
"He said, "I'm going to clear the trees,' " Jones said, "and I said, "Oooh no. You're going to trim one tree.' "
Riddlesworth, a 54-year-old homebuilder, describes an entirely different scenario, which Jones denies.
Both neighbors had hired Reed to do work, Riddlesworth said.
"He's kind of a jobber who came through the neighborhood," Riddlesworth said. "Jones had given him a deposit to do some of the work in the yard."
According to Riddlesworth, Jones told Reed he wanted the trees removed, but couldn't afford it. Reed related that to Riddlesworth, who also wanted the trees removed, and offered to pay for it.
So, Riddlesworth said, "We came home one day and the work had been done, and we paid him, and that was that."
Jones said he never hired Reed for anything.
Reed, like the cherry laurels, has disappeared.
Two months before the Lake Crenshaw incident, Reed was charged in Brooksville with organized fraud. The Hernando County Sheriff's Office said he had accepted $1,810 from an elderly couple to repair their roof, then never did the work.
Freed on bail, Reed missed two court hearings. A warrant for his arrest has been outstanding since Feb. 19, a prosecutor said.
Reed's mother, who lives in Zephyrhills, said she hasn't heard from him since January.
Riddlesworth has had his own skirmishes with the law.
In the 1980s, he was president of Fastrax, Inc., a Tampa company that produced warehousing and material-handling systems and was winning a mushrooming stack of government contracts.
But a $10.7-million federal contract to install an automated warehouse in Mechanicsburg, Pa., went awry. The government began rejecting invoices. Fastrax filed for bankruptcy in 1990.
A few months later, Riddlesworth and the company were indicted for conspiracy to defraud the government, plus 24 counts of making false statements or claims. The company pleaded guilty in 1992 to all counts and paid a $25,000 fine. Riddlesworth pleaded guilty to the conspiracy count and paid $5,000.
Now, 11 years later, Jones said he'd like to sue Riddlesworth, but only if the cost of doing so doesn't exceed the likely award.
"If I'm just paying a lawyer to churn the milk, that wouldn't be prudent," he said.
Because Hillsborough County's tree ordinance was violated, someone could be fined as much as $4,000. If the oaks and the big cherry laurel were healthy, their destruction would have been blocked through a permit inspection, said Christa Hull, the county environmental scientist who enforces the tree ordinance.
But Hull said she doesn't know who to believe. Riddlesworth, Jones and Reed all could be cited, she said.
"Somebody is leaving some gaps in their story," she said. "I wanted to just talk to Mr. Reed to tell me who said what.
"Is it Jones or Riddlesworth? I think that's the big question: Who requested the job to be done?
"I've got to sit down with my manager and talk about this one."
