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Nearly a year later, fence issue ends

Mary Greer says she thought she was helping her neighbor by trashing the fallen fence. Instead, it landed her in jail.

By ANDREW MEACHAM
Published April 3, 2006

Last summer, Mary Greer awoke to a loud knock on her door. Two Hillsborough County sheriff's deputies stood outside. The deputies said they had come to arrest Greer for grand theft.

Greer, 41, didn't deny asking her husband to cart off three fallen sections of her neighbor's chain-link fence to a dump.

In any case, Greer told Deputy Sheila Mitchell that morning, she had a boundary survey of her Gibsonton home showing that the fence stood on her property.

None of it mattered. Deputies took Greer to the Orient Road jail, where she remained for the next eight hours.

On Mar. 27, prosecutors dropped charges against Greer, ending a yearlong legal nightmare. They did so after looking at the survey that Greer told authorities about on the morning she went to jail.

Defending herself cost Greer more than $5,000. She said she still does not understand why she ever went to jail.

The story started, she said, during Hurricane Frances in 2004. The storm battered parts of an old fence belonging to Dennis Lane, her next-door neighbor on Prevatt Street. Two more hurricanes took down the fence completely.

Lane, who owns a carnival business, was out of town. He returned months later, late in 2005, and began building a new wooden fence.

Then Lane left town again. In April, the fallen sections of old fence still lay in the yard. Greer asked her husband, Rickey Baxley, to haul the sections to a dump.

"I thought I was doing him a favor," she said.

About two weeks later in April, after she filed a code enforcement complaint about the new fence, Greer hired surveyor Eddie P. Jenkins to survey her property. That survey, she said, shows that the original fence was on her property, not Lane's.

Lane returned in May and complained to the Sheriff's Office that Greer had removed the fence without his consent.

Deputy Mitchell investigated the case. She watched as surveyors for Mooney and Associates, hired by Lane, measured his property.

In her arrest report, Mitchell cited Lane's own assessment of the survey results: The fence had been on his property.

When Mitchell and another deputy came to Greer's house in July, Greer recalls saying, "You must have come to arrest me for stealing my own fence."

But inside, Greer said, she was terrified.

Lane, 47, said he does not know why deputies arrested Greer.

"I didn't want to file charges," Lane said. "I just wanted her to stop tearing down my fence."

On the morning of her trial in the Hillsborough Circuit Court, Greer said she felt like vomiting. But moments after court began before Judge Robert Foster Jr., Assistant State Attorney Chinwe Fossett announced that the state was withdrawing its case.

"This is about neighbors not getting along and nothing more complicated than that," said attorney Donald Harrison, who represents Greer.

Assistant State Attorney Mark Lewis, who evaluates whether to file charges in cases, said that prosecutors decided to drop the case after receiving Greer's notarized survey. Even though that survey was performed three weeks before her arrest, prosecutors had not seen it, Lewis said.

"When you have dueling surveyors up there, we just made the judgment call not to proceed with the case," Lewis said.

Greer said that the experience has left her shaken. She consults an inch-thick, handwritten journal when talking about the case. Names of key players are highlighted in yellow.

Despite her win in court, Greer said she feels cheated.

"It's just a hassle that people can do this and take about a year of your life," she said. "It's malicious prosecution."

A version of this story appeared in some regional editions of the Times.

[Last modified April 3, 2006, 00:42:17]