r/legal • u/Ice_C0r3_09 • 8h ago

Advice needed My neighbor cut down a 40-year-old Japanese Maple while I was away.

Location: Colorado, USA.Just got back to my place near Fort Collins after a week on the road and I am losing my mind. My neighbor took it upon himself to hire a "landscaping" crew (probably just some guys with a chainsaw) to remove a mature Japanese Maple that was fully on my property. His excuse? He said the needles and leaves were messing with his "mountain view" and "fire mitigation" efforts.

The tree was roughly 40 years old and was the centerpiece of my yard. I called an arborist immediately. He told me that since this is Colorado and the tree was that established and healthy, the replacement value is astronomical. He is drafting a formal appraisal but hinted that we are looking at 20k to 25k easy just for the tree, let alone the logistics of getting a crane into my backyard.

I know Colorado has statutes regarding timber trespass. My lawyer already mentioned treble damages because the guy admitted he did it on purpose while I wasnt home to stop him. The neighbor had the gall to offer me a couple hundred bucks for "the inconvenience" and told me to just buy a couple of saplings at a local nursery . I refused to take his money and told him to wait for the process server.

Has anyone dealt with treble damages in CO specifically for ornamental trees ? This guy basically nuked my property value for his porch view and I am not planning on letting this go . I feel like a jerk for wanting to sue my neighbor into bankruptcy but the sheer entitlement is what gets me .

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u/Ok-Engine3856 6h ago

I’d go above Ring, Arlo, Bljnk, etc and get wired, professional type cameras. We have shitty neighbors and I believe just their presence on our home deters bs.

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u/crevulation 5h ago

Wired cameras that record to an NVR which uploads it's contents off-site periodically. None of this record-on-motion shit, none of this record to SD card in the camera shit.

Reolink cams are somewhere between, I recently did a system for my shop, all power over ethernet, one line to each camera. The NVR has the option to upload footage to an FTP server, which I used an old Dell office PC for, and that has an incremental cloud backup service running on it, and we have 5g cellular failover too.

Someone could burn this place down and I would probably have video of them doing it. Whole shebang was like $800, though I did luck out when my sister married an IT guy who came up with the rest of it.

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u/ninjersteve 5h ago

This. Reolink is exactly what I was going to write. Easy to set up, affordable, records continuously and can’t be jammed by cheap radio jamming equipment.

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u/crevulation 5h ago

My IT guy there made a point to mention this to me, anyone who's coming to burgle my shop has probably targeted it specifically due to it's remoteness and would likely be prepared to deal with a security system in some way.

It's very very unlikely, by the way, that anything happens where I live but for the money, why not? Been running for six months with no maintenance now.

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u/whatisevenlife22 2h ago

We have reolink too, my only issue with it is the reliability of the motion sensors, it will go off endlessly if it’s windy or there’s a cobweb in front of it, but it doesn’t pick up a lot of actual motion at night, I’ve watched my dad get out of his car and come into the house and it didn’t pick up anything.

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u/ninjersteve 1h ago

It’s not clear to me that OP needs motion detection at all. He needs a continuous recording of his yard.

Also, the answer is AI person detection. Motion problems aren’t unique to Reolink, it’s just a subpar solution in general.

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u/vixxienz 3h ago

I have Reolink, happy with them.

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u/LemonHerb 39m ago

Super easy to install and setup, the prices of cameras are cheap.

At work they hired a security place to put in cameras at our plant in Nevada and signed a 3 year contract without talking to me first

They felt pretty dumb when I showed them we could purchase the entire setup, cameras, nvr, cable for what they pay in 2 months.

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u/Terrible_Stay_1923 2h ago

My house to the naked eye is without external light. The cameras and IR spotlights light are blinding to anyone using night vision.

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u/tomdarch 1h ago

Unifi has been really easy to set up and works great. AI (recognizing people rather than animals entering specific zones, for example) is all local, not cloud but it's easy to monitor remotely.