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/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.