Someone had driven through the soybean field on the east side of the road, through the planted rows, through the emerging pods, through 200 feet of crop that represented four months of work and $6,000 in seed fertilizer and diesel. The tracks were wide, deep, and deliberate. The driver had cut a path through my beans like a lawn mower through tall grass, leaving a swath of crushed plants and exposed red clay that would take a full season to recover. My neighbor Roy's trail camera mounted on his fence post overlooking the creek crossing had captured the vehicle at 6:45 a.m. A white Cadillac Escalade with dealer plates turning off the road, bouncing through the drainage ditch and plowing through my soybean field at 15 mph. Diane Prescott.
She hadn't just driven around my gate. She'd driven through my crop to prove that no gate, no lock, and no sign would stop her from using what she'd decided was her shortcut. I stood in that field and counted the damage. 212 feet of destroyed soybeans, 43 rows. At current commodity prices, roughly $2,800 in lost yield, and that was just this strip.
The cumulative crop damage from 4 months of daily traffic along the road edges was closer to $8,000. Sarah found me standing there when she got home from school. She looked at the tracks, looked at me, and said, "What are you going to do?" "I'm going to let her keep thinking she's winning." I said, "And then I'm going to make sure she never drives on this property again."
Sarah studied my face for a moment. She'd been married to me for 17 years. She knew what that expression meant. "Good," she said, "because I'm tired of being polite about it." Diane's next move told me everything I needed to know about how she operated.
She didn't just want to use my road. She wanted to own it legally, permanently, and with the full weight of county government behind her. 2 weeks after the soybean field incident, I received a certified letter from the Colton County Roads Department. The letter informed me that a formal petition had been filed requesting the county designate my farm road as a prescriptive easement, a legal right-of-way established by continuous public use over a statutory period. The petition claimed that the road had been used by community members and the general public for an extended period exceeding the statutory requirement and that blocking access constituted an unreasonable interference with established transportation patterns.
The petition was signed by 43 Ridgewood residents. The cover letter was written on Ridgewood Estates HOA letterhead and the signature at the bottom belonged to Diane Prescott, HOA president. She was trying to legally steal my road with a petition on letterhead with a gold logo. The woman who couldn't figure out how padlocks work was now attempting real estate law. In Texas, if someone uses private property openly, continuously, and without permission for 10 years, they can petition for a prescriptive easement, a legal right of way.