Estelle and I have already talked about it. Camille looked at me for a long moment. Hayes, are you sure? I'm sure. Camille, set the cameras.
She set the cameras. We had no idea how hard they would hit. The first HOA fine arrived 3 weeks later in a cream envelope with the Bayou Pines Estates logo in gold foil. $8,500 for quote nonconforming landscape elements on the front and side lawn. The landscape elements were the same fan palms, plumb baggo beds, and crushed shell borders that had been on my property since I purchased the house in 2021. I did not respond.
The second fine arrived 10 days later, $12,400. The third fine arrived 7 days after that, $18,700. By the end of April, my total accumulated HOA citations were just over $42,000 with daily penalties accruing. Each fine was hand-delivered by a man in a Navy uniform. The man was a Sentinel Guard.
He did not look at me. He did not speak to me. He left the envelope on my doormat and walked back to his patrol golf cart with the strobe light still flashing. Carlen Vorhees called me twice during that period. She left messages with Estelle.
The voicemails were polite, the way a woman is polite right before she switches to a different tone. They suggested I stop by the HOA office for a friendly chat about getting this resolved. I did not stop by. Then Spencer Vorhees sent his men after May. It was a Tuesday afternoon in early May.
May had finished a tennis match at her school in Lakewood Ranch and was waiting on the curb for me to pick her up. Two Sentinel guards in a marked patrol golf cart pulled up beside her at the curb. One of them rolled down the side curtain and said loud enough for three other parents to hear. May Marston, could you let your grandfather know that he is creating a problem for your family at home? May was 14.
She is freckled, smart, sarcastic. She is also her mother's daughter, which means she does not scare easily. She looked the Sentinel guard in the eye. Sir, my grandfather worked in the FBI for 28 years. He's not going to be creating any problems.
You are. Then she turned away from the cart and walked up to a math teacher named Mrs. Honeycutt who had been standing 30 feet away the whole time. Mrs. Honeycutt called me before May did. She gave me the plate number on the cart. She also told me that she had been on the Lakewood Ranch Teachers Union for 19 years, that she had a brother who had been a county prosecutor in Tallahassee, and that whatever I needed her to do for this case, she would do for free.
I called Camille at the field office. Camille, we are not waiting until the citation. They went after my granddaughter today. She was already moving. By the next morning, an unmarked white panel van had been quietly parked at 6722 Bayou Drive, two houses down from mine, in the driveway of a retired federal magistrate named Theon Aley, who had been briefed and had volunteered the driveway space without being asked twice.