2003-12-04 Incident Description

Description of Incident for Criminal Warrant Application

The following text was my description of what happened on 11/25, attached to the criminal warrants I filed for Lynne & Bubba. I've reformatted it slightly for clarity, but the text is unaltered.

Brief Summary

I attempted to retrieve some personal and business property from 1242 Hull Road, where it had been left with permission of the residents there (the defendants, Lynne Griever and Willard Dale "Bubba" Griever), but they would not let me retrieve any of the property still on the premises. They said they were holding it against payment of an undisclosed amount I owe them.

Longer Description

This is one chunk of a larger set of disputes between myself and Lynne Griever (hereinafter referred to as "Lynne") and Willard Dale "Bubba" Griever (hereinafter referred to as "Bubba"); I am herewith pursuing recovery of the material goods only, and plan to pursue monetary grievances as a separate issue. Bubba is president of a not-for-profit company, The ReDistribution Alternative (hereinafter referred to as "RDA", web site http://redistribution.org) for which they both work in addition to any other employment they may have.

I have been trying for many months now to retrieve my car (and its keys), piano, some business merchandise, and some personal belongings from 1242 Hull Road, where Lynne and Bubba live.

When I arrived at 1242 Hull Road on the morning of November 25, 2003 and attempted to retrieve these items, Lynne and Bubba declined to allow me to retrieve the car, car keys, piano, or business merchandise. The trailer containing my personal items was no longer present; Lynne said that Neff Rental of Athens (the owner of the trailer, hereinafter referred to as "Neff") had hauled it off, and the person who answered the phone at Neff told me it had been because of an outstanding balance due on the account. (RDA had been renting that trailer and two others from Neff.)

I called the police, who witnessed that Lynne and Bubba would not let me have any of the above items except for those in the Neff trailer no longer on their property (see police report). Lynne and Bubba said they were holding the remaining items (car, piano, merchandise) as security against a debt I supposedly owe them. They have declined to give a total or any itemization for this debt. Quite to the contrary, my accounting shows that they owe me approximately $10,000 (an amount which accumulated from small loans and other such transactions over the years we worked together, and for which I have given them many accountings over those years, and for which they have not produced any evidence of significant inaccuracy or any itemizations of credits they wish applied to this accounting) which is the major part of the monetary grievance I am pursuing separately.

Personal Property in Trailer:

I had been paying $150/month for storage of my personal property in a "container" (the "trailer" part of a tractor-trailer, which RDA in turn rented from Neff); I had been paying RDA regularly, on time, and was paid up through the end of November. The checks were made payable either to "Lynne Griever", "ReDistribution Alternative," or "Neff Rental" – for any given month, I would ask Lynne how she wanted the check made out and how it should be delivered, and follow her instructions.

My personal property which was in the trailer had been considerably damaged when the trailer was moved. When I originally moved it into the trailer, I had put items on shelves as high as 8 feet off the floor. These shelves had fallen over and a lot of my old audio equipment was damaged or destroyed – mostly shattered covers and broken tone-arms on phonograph turntables, and an old clavichord (musical keyboard instrument) had most of its strings broken. I do not know how much the clavichord strings will cost to replace; I would estimate that the other damage did not exceed $200, plus the time I lost cleaning out the mess so I could move items into the Uhaul truck I was renting -- which meant that I did not have time to move everything out that day, which meant that I later had to hire workers to move the remaining items from the truck (and a locksmith to open the lock) as Neff Rental would not give me any extra time to arrange another visit to Athens to do it myself. I will be including these extra expenses with the monetary grievances to be pursued separately.

Note, however, that I consider Lynne and Bubba responsible for the potential loss of the entire contents of the trailer due to negligence, because she had not informed me that the trailer had been moved much less that it was going to be cleaned out and all the contents discarded on Monday, December 8, had I not shown up at 1242 Hull Road in person to witness that the trailer was gone. (When I asked Neff for an extension on the deadline, Neff told me they had already promised the trailer to another customer, so I'm quite sure Lynne or Bubba could not have arranged an extension either.)

I had attempted many times over the preceding months to arrange with Lynne (mostly by email) an earlier date suitable to them for retrieving at least the trailer items, and generally received either no answer or a response which did not address the practical issues of arranging the date.

The car

I originally gave the car keys to Lynne because she had agreed to rent the car from me for $100/week for her work-related trips to Atlanta. Her then-employer was going to cover the cost of rental. (I never received more than one or two weeks' payment towards this rental; that issue is part of the monetary issues I plan to pursue separately.)

At some point (I was never given a date for when this happened, but it appears to have been in July of 2002), the car developed some sort of problem, described to me as electrical in nature, which prevented it from being started. At that point, rather than returning the car to me – I was at that time living on 2895 Danielsville Road in Athens – they kept the car on their property, with repeated promises to fix the functional problem and to complete repairs to cosmetic damage Lynne had caused when she had involved the car in a fender-bender some weeks before it was incapacitated. I agreed I would deduct reasonable repair expenses, for the functional issue only, from the back rental owed to me, once repairs were complete and I was given receipts for same – but as far as I know, no repairs were completed and no receipts for expenses were ever submitted to me. I consider Lynne to be responsible for repair costs for the fender-bender damage.

When I visited 1242 Hull Road to retrieve the car, I was told that I was not allowed to have it towed away. Bubba showed me that he had the keys, but would not let me have them.

The piano

Lynne initially said she had no problem with my taking the piano but did not feel comfortable allowing me inside the house to retrieve it; when I suggested that I could hire a third party to move the piano, I was told I couldn't have it after all.

Merchandise

The merchandise consists mostly of t-shirts and small gift-type items purchased for sale online by my company, Cox-Staddon Enterprises d.b.a. Red House Media. I had a tentative verbal agreement with Bubba that he (and/or RDA) would pay me back for the merchandise as well as the other debt, at which point any unsold merchandise would become his, but this payback never happened (their debt accumulated rather than diminishing) so I withdrew the offer. The invoices for the sales all show the items were sold to "Red House Media", not to RDA or Bubba personally. I can provide a detailed listing of items which we inventoried, as well as estimates of the non-inventoried items based on quantities purchased and reconciled with sales records and my memories of what was in stock the last time I saw it – and of course copies of all invoices in my possession.